


The Leash

by downjune



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Post-Canon, Consent Issues, Fix-It, M/M, Post-Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Soul Bond, Underage Kissing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-13
Updated: 2019-07-13
Packaged: 2020-05-19 04:55:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 30,217
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19349908
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/downjune/pseuds/downjune
Summary: Peter didn’t know if they talked to anyone else who carried them, but when he had the Infinity Gauntlet tucked under his arm, he could swear the stones were trying to…commune with him. They wanted something from him. Wanted to be used. He wanted to be rid of them.Until he found Tony Stark leaned against some torn up tree roots and rock. He found Tony dying.At that point, Peter was ready to bargain.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [LearnedFoot](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LearnedFoot/gifts).



> Well, I had visions of this fic being under 10k, but they were just that, lol. It's a monster, but your prompts were too great to resist. I hope you like this, LearnedFoot!
> 
> A huge thank you to my beta, Tuesday, for the last-minute read. So helpful! Any remaining errors are my own.
> 
> Lyrics at the end are Flo and the Machine.

Peter didn’t know if they talked to anyone else who carried them, but when he had the gauntlet tucked under his arm, he could swear the stones were trying to…commune with him. They wanted something from him. Wanted to be used. He wanted to be rid of them as quickly as possible.

Until he found Tony Stark leaned against some torn up tree roots and rock. He found Tony dying. 

At that point, Peter was ready to bargain. 

The light had faded from Tony’s eyes and from the arc reactor, and all Peter’s blubbering had meant exactly nothing. Tony had looked at him and smiled through his fear, clasped his hand, and died. He’d been afraid to die—Peter had seen it—and Peter, well, he was beyond terrified to live in a world without Tony, so he turned his ear to the stones and listened to what they offered.

The Reality Stone promised him the illusion of Tony—a perfect likeness to get up and walk away with him, wherever they wanted to go. Space offered him a way out, escape anywhere he wanted. Power promised him bloody vengeance. The Mind Stone offered peace and sleep. But Time offered to undo it all—to restart Tony’s heart and erase the burns creeping from the collar of his suit. Time offered a second chance.

Peter reached for that one.

Strange got to it first.

“What are you planning to do with that, exactly?” Strange asked, towering over him. The stone hovered out of its place in the gauntlet, inches from Peter’s hand. All around him, the world had stopped, the battlefield frozen. 

“Make him alive again,” Peter answered. He looked up as Strange’s ridiculous cloak flapped without a breeze, nearly smacking him in the face. “Obviously.”

Strange frowned, humoring him. “So that, what? He can die again? Or he can not take the gauntlet, Thanos snaps his fingers, and _you_ die again?”

“No,” Peter bit out. “ _Obviously_.”

“Then, what do you think is going to happen?”

“I don’t know—help me figure something out! But we have to save him. He saved all of us. He brought all of us back, and—” Peter’s throat clogged, and he choked out a sob, tears coming hot to his eyes. “We can’t leave him like this. We can’t let him die. There’s still time if we hurry.”

“Not with this there isn’t,” Strange said, and snatched the stone out of the air. He never actually touched it, though, more like coaxed it back inside the pendant he still wore. “Sorry, kid. Think of something else.”

Peter thought briefly and fiercely of webbing Strange to the ground and prying the rock back out of that fancy necklace. But a sixth, strangely familiar voice called to him. It reminded him of its presence, and he turned back to see the Soul Stone glowing on the gauntlet. More than any of the others, the Soul Stone wanted to make a deal.

Peter couldn’t say why exactly, but that scared him the most. Whatever it wanted from him in exchange for Tony’s life, the cost would be high. 

_A soul for a soul_ , it whispered. 

His instincts were usually right.

He thought of offering his life in exchange for Tony’s but couldn’t picture that going well. Tony would end up with the stone and somehow undo what Peter had done. Round and round they’d go in a pointless contest of self-sacrifice. And if he was honest, Peter didn’t want to give up his life for Tony’s anyway—he wanted a world with both of them in it.

Peter needed to play this game and win—once and for always.

The stones were meant to be used, he reasoned. They were made to be wielded—sure, by somebody more powerful than Peter, but if Tony Stark could wrangle them all, then Peter could use just the one. For just one life.

 _You can have mine_ , he offered silently, because he didn’t think he needed to speak out loud to a rock. _But I get to keep him. We stay together on Earth, alive. And you can have what comes next. So, it’s a two-fer, really. My life and afterlife._

Peter had been dead once already —Dr. Strange had explained it to him while they waited on Titan—so this time, he knew exactly what the “what comes next” was. Death got a lot less scary the second time around, but living without Tony Stark? No, thanks.

With the terms of the bargain on the table, Peter noticed the deafening silence around him and turned to see everyone still frozen. Strange watched him carefully, his dramatic eyebrows drawn together. 

“You’re really gonna let me do this?” Peter asked. He hadn’t meant to phrase it as a question.

Strange shrugged. “The Time Stone is my responsibility. This, I’m more curious than anything.”

Peter squinted up at him. “Did you see me do it already? Is this what I’m supposed to do?”

“No idea. You’re flying blind. Gotta say, I’m impressed.”

“Thanks.”

Then, before he could think on it any longer, Peter snatched the Soul Stone from the gauntlet and pressed it into Tony’s bare left hand. He closed his right over top. _Do we have a deal?_

For the span of two full breaths, Peter felt only the fading warmth of Tony’s palm, and he took a few seconds to feel really stupid for bargaining with a rock at all. Then Tony’s skin heated next to his. 

No—that was the stone. The Soul Stone had started to burn.

Pain shot up his arm and travelled straight to his heart like he’d touched a live wire, too sharp and shocking to allow him even to breathe, let alone shout. Across from him, Tony—Tony’s body—jolted, jerked, and slumped sideways against the earth. He—it—tugged Peter forward, and he toppled over, weak with pain, his free arm folding awkwardly underneath him against the crumbling tree roots and rocks. 

Then it stopped. The sensation faded as quickly as it had come on, and beside him, Tony coughed and gasped. 

Tony breathed. 

Peter exhaled a short disbelieving laugh. Collapsed half on top of him already, he pressed a kiss to Tony’s dusty, bloody temple and fell into blackness like he’d dropped down a sewer manhole. 

*

Peter awoke to commotion. His heart beat wildly, everything hurt, and he was freaking the hell out without really knowing why. He’d been sleeping like the dead.

He’d been dead.

Wait, no. Well, yes, but—

His eyes felt glued shut, but he managed to peel them open, managed to shove up to his elbows to see a room with drastically fewer superheroes than had been on the battlefield. Peter was on a really comfy couch in somebody’s log-cabin living room with a blanket over him and an IV drip in his arm. And across from him, on a roll-away cot and raising hell, was Tony.

Peter put a hand to his chest, willed his heart to quit racing, and took a few seconds to soak in the sight of Tony Stark alive. He was out of his suit, of course, in a plain t-shirt, and with his arms bare, Peter could see the burns from the gauntlet disappear into his sleeve. But they looked old—more scar than burn. His hair was wild, his meticulous beard filling in more salt than pepper. His face was naked without a pair of tinted glasses, and he was probably the most fantastic thing Peter had ever seen. 

“Mr. Stark,” Peter tried, but his voice cracked, and he reached for the glass of water sitting next to him on the coffee table. He was out of his suit too, dressed in his own pajamas, a fact quickly explained when Aunt May nearly tackled him sideways into the back of the couch.

It’d only been a few days since he’d seen her, but he’d also been to outer space and dead for five years, so who really knew what that translated to for her.

“How long was I out?” he croaked into her hair. 

“Three days! But I’ve only been here since yesterday. Peter, the apartment was rented to somebody else because we’ve been gone five years. Did you know that? Our stuff is in storage. Are you all right? How are you feeling—are you hungry?”

He nodded, and part of his brain knew he should be listening more closely to Aunt May. All their stuff was in storage. But he couldn’t tear his eyes away from Tony, over her shoulder. “I’m all right,” he said absently. Tony hadn’t looked at him yet. The Incredible Hulk was checking him over as though it were normal for a giant green guy to hold a human-sized stethoscope. Rhodey was there, too.

“I’ve gotta pee.” As May helped him to his feet, he couldn’t decide whether to be relieved or disappointed that there seemed to be no flashing neon sign declaring he’d been the one to bring Tony back. Aunt May was the only one to notice he was even awake. Not that he wanted cheers or pats on the back or anything. Really, who besides Strange even knew Peter had done anything? After a quick scan of the room, Peter was pretty sure Strange wasn’t even there. Maybe he hadn’t told anyone what had gone down.

It was weird that Peter had passed out for three days. That was definitely weird, given his healing factor—and that he hadn’t even been hurt.

He felt a little wobbly on his feet now, and his chest ached some, but mostly he felt fine, given the circumstances. Or he did until May had helped him through the kitchen and into a little half-bathroom just off it. Once inside, pain shot up his arm to his heart, the ache in his chest flaring into something so bright and awful, he almost fell and cracked his head on the toilet.

“Peter!” May grabbed for him, and he cried out, his arm on _fire_. He flinched away, and at the sound—the feel—of Tony’s shout, Peter tried to shove back out of the bathroom. He sucked in a sharp breath as the IV pulled. May had rolled it along with them, and the needle pulled sickeningly in his opposite arm. It still didn’t compare to the livewire connected to his heart. 

“Oh my god!” she shouted as he yanked the needle out and bolted.

He stumbled through the kitchen and rounded the big comfy couch as fast as his legs would carry him. 

Tony was half off the bed, the legs of his sweatpants sliding up over his shins, and when he looked up—when he finally locked eyes with Peter, the pain vanished. 

“Mr. Stark,” he said in relief and flung himself into Tony’s grip.

“Hey, kid,” he grunted, lurching back against the bed. 

“Are you okay? How do you feel?”

“Better now,” Tony answered. “Thought I was dead there for a minute. Coulda sworn I was, actually.”

“Huh, that’s weird,” Peter said quickly. “But you’re not dead. You made it. We did it.” 

“Right,” Tony said, after a long second.

Peter hadn’t let go yet, and he didn’t want to. With his face pressed to Tony’s neck and his arms the whole way around Tony’s middle, he thought he could close his eyes and sleep again. Wow, he was tired. Really, weirdly tired. Tony kept hold of him just as tight. “I’m really glad you’re okay,” Peter whispered.

“Right back at ya, kid.” Tony’s voice rumbled through Peter’s ribs and settled him in his skin after the strangeness of waking up, after the pain when he’d left to use the bathroom. Which he still really needed to do. 

Behind them, Banner cleared his throat, and Tony pushed Peter away, arms stiff. “Let the kid have a bathroom break before the inquisition,” Tony said, which was a strange thing to say. Peter didn’t think he’d said anything out loud just now about having to pee. 

“Thanks?” Peter shrugged sheepishly at everyone standing around staring at him and tried again for the bathroom. This time, he was only halfway there when the pain crept back up his arm, starting right from the center of his hand. He hissed and paused, squeezing his fingers into a fist. If he took another step, something told him it’d get way worse. 

“ _Actually_ , let’s both take a break,” Tony said from behind him, his voice tight. Peter spun around to see him pluck the IV bag off its hook and start toward him. “Come on, the en suite is way bigger.”

As he got closer, the pain eased and disappeared, and Peter just caught Tony’s quick exhalation. His shoulders dropped too as Peter followed him to what had to be the master bedroom. Tony seemed to know right where he was going.

“Is this your house?” Peter asked.

“Yup,” Tony answered. “Built it after half the universe went poof. My fortress of grief and solitude. After you.” He gestured for Peter to go first but then followed him right inside. It was a very nice bathroom, but Peter couldn’t care too much that this was his first time in an en suite, because Tony was backing him up against the sink.

“What’s goin’ on, Underoos? There’s something real shifty afoot.” 

“Wh-what do you mean, Mr. Stark?” Peter braced both hands on the sink. Tony wasn’t that tall, but neither was Peter, and the way Tony leaned over him made his stomach jump. So did watching Tony take out his own IV and drop the mostly empty drip in the trash. His arm gave a twinge, too.

Should Peter come right out and say? Explain the deal he’d struck? _Could_ he even explain it?

“Kid, I’m feelin’ real jumpy. Your face was the last thing I saw on that battlefield, and the first thing I see waking up, and I feel like—what the _fuck_ is that?”

“What—” Before Peter could react, Tony snatched his right hand and turned it palm up. 

“Holy shit,” Peter said, voice awed. The Soul Stone burn sat there, smack in the middle of his hand, a small red blotch. But even stranger was the red line running up the inside of his arm, all the way to… He tugged aside the sleeve of his t-shirt. Yeah, it ran all the way into his armpit—that soft spot that led right to the heart. 

Three days had passed, and it hadn’t healed like all his other cuts and bruises from the fight. How had he not noticed it before now?

“You’re just seeing this?” Tony asked. “You don’t know what it is—because I’ve got one just like it.”

“Whoa, really?” He turned Tony’s hand over by reflex, and there it sat, a matching mark. Or scar? “Does it hurt?” He traced the line with his first two fingers, and Tony shivered hard, yanking his hand away. 

“Only when you’re not in the room.” He said it accusingly, and Peter ducked his gaze.

“Right…”

“You didn’t notice that? You left with Aunt Hottie, and I started yelling? I thought I was having a heart attack, and then you came barreling back in, and I—” He cut himself off. 

“Felt better?” Peter offered. 

“Something like that, yeah,” Tony said, brows drawn together. 

“Me too.”

“You know what this is, don’t you. Pete.” At the sound of his name from Tony’s mouth, Peter looked up. “What is this?” 

He shrugged and tried to keep it casual. “I’m not exactly sure.”

Tony barked a laugh and rubbed a hand through his hair. “That’s fine. That’s great. What’s the inexact version, then? Tell me while you’re peeing. I know you have to pee. _Why_ do I know you have to pee?”

Peter really _wasn’t_ sure, but he really did have to go, so when Tony stepped back, he took the opportunity. The toilet sat right next to the sink, but Tony turned his back and gave him a little privacy. 

Normally, he wasn’t shy about this sort of thing. What dude could be, using public bathrooms in New York all his life? But eventually Tony turned on the faucet for him. “Okay, spill.”

Peter sniggered.

“Out with it. Let it flow.”

“The truth or the—”

“Both. Come on, kid.” Peter glanced over to see that Tony had hopped up to sit on the sink. “Hey, watch where you’re aiming. I have to clean my own toilets out here.”

“How hard for you. That’s terrible, Mr. Stark,” Peter said with all the sincerity he could fake. 

“Don’t get off track, kid.” He said it sternly, but there was a smile in his voice, and a wild swell of accomplishment and gratitude filled Peter’s chest. Peter had made this possible. Because Tony had brought him back and saved the world. They’d saved each other. So they could be together here in Tony’s bathroom.

Not weird at all. It was perfect.

Peter finished up, flushed the toilet, and washed his hands without answering. Without knowing how to answer. Because, of course, the truth was he didn’t know what he’d done.

“What do the marks mean, Pete?” Tony rubbed his hand up the inside of his arm, but he kept his eyes on Peter. All the attention and focus Peter had wanted since Mr. Stark had breezed into his life and onto his couch two years ago. Or seven years ago.

“They mean that I…” Peter hesitated, but what was the point in lying? He was a terrible liar. Lying to Tony Stark would get him into way worse trouble than telling the truth, if past precedent was anything to go by. They were both scientists, basically. Truth was the most important thing, right?

“They mean that I used the Soul Stone.” At the dramatic lift of Tony’s eyebrows, Peter added, “Sir.”

*

“He brought me back from the _dead_ , Bruce! From the dead! Using the Infinity gem that killed Nat and Nebula’s sister.” Tony gestured expansively, like he could capture the gravity of what Peter had done.

But Banner just shrugged his enormous shoulders, expression skeptical. “I know you want me to be upset, Tony, but honestly I’m just glad you’re still around. And look at it this way, nobody died to bring you back.”

“That we know of. We don’t know the cost of this thing. We don’t know—”

“You’d only been gone a few seconds,” Peter offered from his place seated on the edge of the kitchen island. Rhodey was needed in DC, so it was just May, Dr. Banner, Tony and Peter left in Tony’s house. “Maybe not even that.”

“Then why didn’t you try, I don’t know, CPR instead of cosmic power rock?” Tony snapped.

“CPR could totally stand for cosmic power rock in this case,” Peter said before he could stop himself. Leaning against his side, May pinched the soft skin below his ribs, then jumped when he jumped. 

Tony rolled his eyes and rubbed a hand over his face, Peter suspected, to hide a smile. Banner snorted a laugh.

“And you know that wouldn’t have worked,” Peter said quietly. “Using the gauntlet was gonna kill you.”

“I did know that,” Tony said. “So, it wasn’t up to you to fix it. Let alone make a deal with the devil.”

“What’s going to happen to him?” May asked. “You said the stone needs a sacrifice, but Peter’s still here, so what does this all mean?”

Banner shook his head. “Not sure yet.”

“It means he gave up something,” Tony interjected, “made an offer the stone couldn’t refuse.”

“From the little we know about the Soul Stone,” Banner continued, “the only thing for certain is that the sacrifice can’t be undone. I used all the stones together to undo the snap, and I couldn’t bring Nat back.”

“Cap hasn’t taken the stones back to their original timelines yet,” Tony said. “I can figure some way to reverse engineer this. Make my own deal, at least.”

“ _No_ ,” Peter bit out. This was exactly what he’d feared when he approached the problem of how to get Tony alive and keep him that way. “I understood the cost, and it was nothing I didn’t give freely. But the terms are that you and I both stay alive. You can’t make the sacrifice play this time, Mr. Stark. It’s already done.”

Tony was rubbing his chest, his brows sloped in a frown. He regarded Peter with confusion in his eyes and fear in his heart. Fear of what, Peter couldn’t tell, exactly. “You and I…” 

Peter nodded. “I asked for both of us in the world together, and I got it. I wasn’t gonna lose you.”

Tony was still for a long moment before he inhaled deeply and shook his head. “I’ll be damned,” he said to himself. “This is a pickle. And I need to sleep on it. You all are welcome to stay, since you already have. My fortress of solitude is your fortress, and all that.” He pushed away from the counter and uncrossed his arms. “I’ll see you in the morning.” He gave Peter a significant look before turning and heading for his bedroom. 

“’Night, Tony,” Banner rumbled.

Peter blinked, not sure what he was supposed to get out of the look until Tony had disappeared into his bedroom and a familiar pain flared in Peter’s arm. He winced, jumping down from the island and instinctively following Tony as though the fire crackling upward toward his heart were leading him. “I’ll be right back, May,” he choked out, picking up his pace. 

He found Tony in his room, clutching at his shoulder, breath short and labored, until Peter shut the door behind them. He reached for Tony with that same instinct, clasping his bare arm and bumping his head gently against his chest. 

“Why’d you do that?” Peter grumbled, though with Tony this close, he almost couldn’t remember the pain. His body kind of hummed with contentment or satisfaction or maybe even happiness. Rightness. Tony rested a heavy hand on the back of his neck, and Peter nearly melted into him. 

“Because I think I understand the cost of this bargain a little better than you do.”

Peter leaned back, bleary and slow with exhaustion that felt more like Tony’s than his own. He was never this tired. “What?”

“You wanted the both of us together and alive, right?” Peter nodded. “Well, you got us on a leash that stretches about twenty feet.”

*

“All right, again. Up and at ’em.”

Peter groaned but climbed back to his feet. His whole arm was numb. “Mr. Stark, I’m really not sure this is the best way to—” 

“Yeah, your complaint has already been logged, but unless you’ve got a better idea, this is what we’re goin’ with. Ready?” 

Peter twisted around to glare at him. “Does it matter? We should wait for Dr. Banner to get back.”

“He’s got a time machine to rebuild. This is what we’re working on, Pete. And attempt number twenty-two…is a go.”

They walked in opposite directions, counting paces like this was a duel. Overhead, the birds sang and the sun shone down on them outside Tony’s lake house. It was a beautiful spot, though all that nature pressing on Peter’s senses was a little overwhelming for a city kid. 

He tried not to think about what was coming, but it was there before he’d reached attempt number twenty-one’s count. Pain gripped his right arm and radiated outward, clenching around his heart and burning down his ribcage. He forced one foot in front of the other and clenched his teeth, taking in short breathes that felt like knives. Eventually, he couldn’t breathe at all. 

Behind him, over the roaring in his ears, he heard Tony’s pained breaths. Peter dropped to his knees when he couldn’t go any farther and put his head down on the ground, but it didn’t help. He waited out Tony, because he would always be able to wait out Tony, and when he heard Mr. Stark drop, he turned and scrambled across the ground to get back to him. 

Tony lay unmoving. Passed out cold. It was actually a relief, because if he was unconscious, he couldn’t object to Peter flopping on top of him like this. Chest to chest, the pain vanished, and Peter breathed deeply, expanding lungs that only half-ached with the memory of pain. He put his hand on Tony’s face, thumbed the haggard lines beneath his eyes and around his mouth, and lay his head on Tony’s shoulder. 

“I know you don’t wanna know what I think,” Peter said quietly. “But I think it’s better after we’re together like this. It’s better after we’re close, not when we fight it.”

“Hmm? Were you talking to me?” Tony stirred under him and put a hand on Peter’s back. He didn’t try to push Peter off.

“I was saying that I don’t think this plan is working. We’ve been at it for two days.”

“Two days is nothing. Our sample size is miniscule—what kind of scientist quits after two days?”

“The kind that passes out after every other trial, maybe? This feels dangerous, Mr. Stark.”

“Yeah, well somebody shoulda thought of that before using a cosmic power rock without an adult present.”

It was good they weren’t looking at each other for this. With Peter’s head on Tony’s chest, they could talk without making eye contact, and Tony was always willing to talk longer if there was no eye contact. Plus, the vibration of his voice against Peter’s skull felt really nice. 

“I had another idea, actually, but you’re probably not gonna like it,” Peter said.

“Does it involve you getting off me? Because I would like that.”

“No.” Peter’s face burned, and he was grateful for the no-eye-contact, too. He put his hand on Tony’s bare arm and rubbed his thumb over the red line tracking up in the inside of it. “This feels better, right? Touching feels better.” 

Tony didn’t need to confirm anything out loud—Peter knew it felt better. Tony’s whole body relaxed, and if he was looking, Peter would have seen the lines between his brows smooth out.

“Yeah, kid, but this is not a sustainable model. We can’t buddy-system our way through life.”

They totally could, but Peter didn’t think he was in a position to lobby for that. “I know,” he said. “But I’m saying, I feel better after we’ve been touching. I feel worse when we don’t touch, or haven’t in a while. It’s like I’m pulled too tight, and we might snap. It feels bad.”

“That’s the idea,” Tony said, not unkindly. He prodded Peter’s shoulder until Peter took the hint and leaned up to meet Tony’s eyes. Conversation almost over, then. “This has to be like a muscle, right? Or a rubber band. We just have to push hard enough, and the distance we can get will stretch. Maybe even break.”

Tony’s words felt like a fist inside Peter’s chest. He backed up off him and sat on the ground, drawing his knees to his chest. Tony sat up with him. 

Peter was grateful for every moment of this that his Aunt May had missed—the yelling and the pain and the passing out. She’d gone back to the city to sort out their lives while Peter stayed upstate to sort out what he’d done to himself and Tony. But right then, he wished she was here to sit with him and yell at Mr. Stark for him.

“Look, I feel like you’re taking this real personally,” Tony said in that way he had when he was trying to be Tony Stark-billionaire-business-man-superhero-adult. “But you understand that if we don’t figure this out, your life as you know it is pretty much over, because I sure as _hell_ am not holding your hand while you finish high school.” Peter barked a helpless laugh at the image. “I’m not going back to college with you, and you can’t be Spider-Man with Iron Man tagging along. The bike thieves are gonna know we’re coming.”

Patrolling with Iron Man was, frankly, all he’d ever wanted, but, “Yeah, I get it.” He glanced up to see Tony regarding him steadily. “I—I’m really sorry about this, Mr. Stark. I know I made a mess, but—” But the truth was he’d never really be sorry for what he’d done. Never ever, ever. 

“Why’d you do it?” Tony asked quietly. And it was just Tony asking, no one else. He could do that now—intuit what was rattling around Peter’s brain, just like Peter could tell which Tony Stark he was talking to. It was cool and scary, just like everything else surrounding this thing.

“I did it because…” Peter shrugged, though there was, of course, nothing casual about his reasons. He looked at his hands when he spoke. “I did it because the world’s ended so many times, Mr. Stark. It keeps ending, and then it restarts and keeps going. And when you died, how was I supposed to treat it any differently? The world ended again, so I had to bring it back. It’s what we do, right?”

Tony was still watching him when Peter glanced up, his head cocked to the side a little, like Peter was a puzzle or a project. Then he opened his mouth and said, “You had no right to do that.”

Peter felt that like a slap—and no one had ever slapped him before. He’d been punched, kicked, dropped, drop-kicked, and crushed under a building, but never slapped. Peter twitched back, and his hands balled into fists.

“No offence, sir, but that’s bullshit.”

“Oh?” Tony’s eyebrows lifted in exaggerated surprise. “And why are my feelings bullshit? I went to therapy once—I’m pretty sure my feelings are supposed to be valid.”

“Because it’s not just about you! I’ve lost—I’ve lost _everybody_. Including my only living family and myself. I was dead for five years, and you brought me back! So don’t tell me not to save the people I love. Please don’t tell me that.” His throat had gotten thick, and his eyes burned, so he took a deep breath and looked away, hooked his arms around his knees and rocked backward to look up at the sky. 

Next to him, Tony made a quiet, thoughtful sound and, miraculously, said nothing.

When Peter had taken a few more deep breaths and managed to swallow the lump in his throat, he said, very carefully, “Did you want to die?”

“That…” Tony shifted beside him, and Peter looked over to see that he’d flopped backward to lie on the ground, arms wide. “…is a really simple way to ask a complicated question.”

“Did you?” Peter asked again. “Sorry, but maybe simple is better.”

Tony shot him a deeply annoyed glance. “No, I didn’t _want_ to die.”

“But…. It sounds like there’s a ‘but.’”

“There’s no ‘but.’ _Simple is better_ , right?” He said it with such characteristic, childish mockery, that Peter laughed. “And even if there were a ‘but,’” Tony continued, “it would be none of your business. I have therapy for that.”

“That you went to once.”

“Yeah, and Banner fell asleep like two minutes into it. Not even.”

“Dr. Banner was your therapist?”

“No, and neither are you, thank god.” With a grunt, Tony rolled back upright and bounced on the balls of his feet. “All right, let’s go again. I’m feeling optimistic this time.”

 _Maybe because we just actually communicated for a minute_ , Peter thought. “You know that each test, the distance we make it to gets shorter, right? We’re losing ground.”

“Not every test. Only some. Let’s test those variables, eh, kid? Do some science.”

Peter blew out a long breath. “Sure thing, Mr. Stark.” This was his fault. He’d done this to them. And maybe Mr. Stark was right. This was the cost. Peter pushed to his feet and stood with his back to Tony. His entire arm was numb—for now.

*

Dr. Banner had stayed upstate because Tony needed a hand rebuilding the time machine that would let Cap return the stones. Ordinarily, Peter would have been unable to keep a lid on his excitement over a real-live time machine that reportedly shrunk you to particle-size and sent you through the quantum realm to a different point in time and space. Not just time. But _space_.

However, Tony was fixated on seeing just how far he could get from Peter without one or both of them passing out and Banner having to drag them back into proximity. And that put a bit of a damper on Peter’s enthusiasm.

“I’m thinking the kid has the right idea, Tony,” Banner called, at the tail-end of attempt number forty-three. Peter had managed to drag himself another six inches across the ground before his body had seized up and he’d collapsed. With barely a grunt, Banner hoisted him up and carried him like a towel over his arm back to the starting line, where he deposited him next to a barely conscious Tony. “It’s worse when you don’t have sustained contact beforehand.”

Peter would be hurt or insulted about all this effort to undo what he’d done if he didn’t understand Tony thought he was doing it for Peter’s own good. Though, actually, no. He understood Tony thought it was for their own good, and he was both hurt _and_ insulted.

“Thank you, Captain Obvious,” Tony slurred, rolling onto his back and searching blindly for Peter’s hand. Peter took it, because taking Tony’s hand cleared his head, but he didn’t want to try to speak through his anger right then. He would absolutely say something he’d regret.

“Hey, I’m not the one who insisted on—what are we up to, forty-three attempts—to reach that conclusion,” Banner said. “You could do permanent damage to yourself if you keep this up.”

“I’m testing variables.”

“You’re making yourself sick. Peter can bounce back from just about anything, but you’re pushing fifty, my friend.”

“All right, _all right_ ,” Tony snapped, pushing himself upright. “Why are you being mean? I get it. Enough.”

“As your doctor, Tony—”

“You’re not my doctor.”

“As the only physician who’s seen you since you used the gauntlet and survived—”

“I was brought back from the dead. What’s your training with walking corpses?”

Peter tugged his hand free and pushed to his feet. Something ugly was about to burst out of him, and he didn’t want an audience when it did.

“All right, as your friend who also has a working knowledge of your medical history, for your sake and for Peter’s, you should stop.”

“That’s fine—we’ll call it a day. Tempers are frayed. I can read a room, so we’ll pick this up in the morning. Pete?”

Peter was running before he’d recognized that the thud of feet in his ears was his own. 

“Pete!”

Pain shot up his arm, but just as quickly, it eased. Tony was following him. He pounded up the steps of the cabin and slammed through the screen door. He went straight for the bedroom he had to share with Tony and shut the door behind him, leaning back against it. More than anything, he wanted solitude, but a moment later, Tony stopped just outside. 

“I know you wanted a dramatic exit, but you and I don’t have that luxury anymore, pal.”

“Leave me alone,” Peter spat. 

“I can’t do that.”

“Go sit on the couch, then. It’s close enough.”

On the other side of the door, Tony took a deep breath. “I know why you’re mad at me. I know more about you than I ever wanted to about a teenage boy.”

The ugly thing knotted up in his chest came out as an embarrassing half-laugh, half sob. “Screw you.”

“Nah, tell me how you really feel.”

“ _Fuck off_.” 

“There it is!”

Peter sank into a squat, his back against the door. He dug his fingers into his hair and squeezed his eyes shut. “Why are you making this so awful?” he said, quiet enough that he half-hoped Tony wouldn’t hear him. 

“Welcome to living with Tony Stark. Nobody makes it more than a year. I’m trying to do you a favor, kid.” His voice was right at Peter’s level. 

“So was I.” The words came out tasting bitter.

Tony was silent for several long seconds. Peter tipped his head back against the door and slid his feet out so he landed on his ass. “I know that,” Tony finally said, stripped down to himself again. 

“Then why won’t you just…let me try to help you. Help us.”

The gentle thud behind him was maybe the back of Tony’s head thumping against the door. Peter, despite himself, liked the symmetry of the image they made. “Because your way is scarier. Because I’m supposed to look out for you, not the other way around. Because this is already fucked up enough.”

Peter rocked forward onto his toes again, pivoted, and put his hand on the bedroom door handle. He hesitated, then pulled it open, just enough that Tony lurched back and caught himself. “Whoa, that was easier than I thought. I hold grudges way longer.”

“Maybe you don’t know me as well as you think. I bounce back quickly,” Peter said. Then he reached for Tony’s hand and pulled him to his feet. 

“Maybe I was projecting my teenage angst onto you,” he said thoughtfully.

“Hey, maybe you should be the therapist.” 

Tony’s laugh came out a surprised huff, and Peter grinned, liking the feel of it. His heart felt tenderized, but so was Tony’s. He placed Tony’s hand on the back of his neck, because he liked it there, and wound his arms tightly around Tony’s middle. He pressed his brow against Tony’s shoulder and took a deep breath that Tony echoed.

“How often does hugging actually, genuinely make it better?” Peter asked. “I think this is great.”

“So, you think the more we do this, the more independently we can operate.”

Peter nodded. “That’s the hypothesis.”

“Paradoxical. Poetic. I’ll give you that.”

“We can make it super scientific, if you want.”

“Let’s not make it weird.”

“Too late for that.”

*

Dr. Banner made dinner, because only he could get the portions right for somebody his size. They didn’t make any plans for testing distance limits the next day. And Tony had his knee pressed to Peter’s under the table the whole time.

Peter thought, when they turned in for the night, he might be glowing, he felt so good. In the bedroom, Tony didn’t look convinced. “So, I guess I can’t make you sleep on the floor anymore, huh,” he said, shrugging out of one of his many layers.

“With all due respect, sir, your bed is probably the biggest one I’ve ever seen.”

“You say that, but your tone implies disrespect.”

“Yeah, I don’t think you’d even know if I was anywhere on this bed with you.”

“Let’s find out, I guess. I’ve been sleeping like shit with the whole thing to myself, so…”

They cleaned up side by side in the bathroom. Tony had a double sink in there, like he’d maybe thought there’d be someone to share with. From what Peter knew from the tabloids at the bodega, his relationship with Pepper Potts had ended not too long before he’d recruited Peter to go to Germany. Tony had certainly never talked about any of it with Peter. He wondered if Ms. Potts had ever been here. She was still mostly running Stark Industries. He wondered if Tony was still in love with her.

Back in the bedroom, they climbed in on opposite sides wearing t-shirts and sweatpants for sleep, even though it was a little warm. 

“Right,” Tony said after several minutes of heavy silence. “So if we sleep touching, we might actually get somewhere tomorrow?”

“Worth a shot, right?” Peter slid closer. It took him an almost comically long time to get close enough to feel Tony’s body heat and to finally wrap a hand around his wrist.

“Okay, bring it in. No point half-assing this. I’ve put you through hell the last few days.”

“Not just me.”

“I put myself through hell all the time. You don’t deserve that.”

Peter scooted closer. When Tony gathered him in with an arm under his shoulders, Peter couldn’t help the groan that escaped his mouth. He rolled into Tony’s side, reached across Tony’s body and hooked his leg across Tony’s thighs. The edge of Tony’s shirt had ridden up, and Peter instinctively slid his hand to the warm, smooth skin of his stomach. 

The muscles of Tony’s abdomen abruptly tightened as he exhaled, and Peter snatched his hand back. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to.”

“No, put your hand back for a second.” Peter did, and when Tony didn’t say anything else, he got a little bold, reaching up to the bottom of his ribs and across to the line of hair running down his stomach. “Like that?” he asked quietly.

With his head on Tony’s shoulder, Peter glanced up quickly to see his eyes were closed. Tony nodded. “I’m comfy if you’re comfy.”

“I’m really comfy,” Peter said.

“Just try not to breathe on me, all right? I can’t sleep with somebody breathing on me.”

“Sure thing.” He shifted down a couple inches so that when he exhaled, it wasn’t aimed at Tony’s face. 

Tony pressed a kiss to the top of Peter’s head and said quietly, “Night, kid.”

Peter rubbed his nose against Tony’s shirt and smiled against his ribs. “Night, Mr. Stark.”

*

“This is amazing. I don’t believe it—friendship really is magic.”

Peter laughed. “What? I can barely hear you!”

From down the road, almost out of earshot, Tony’s voice came back slightly amplified like he’d cupped his hands around his mouth. “I said, _Peter Parker is a goddamn genius_.”

Peter took an exaggerated bow that no one saw and then leapt over the porch railing with a little more bounce than was strictly necessary. What the hell—this was a celebratory bounce. 

They weren’t keeping official record of what Peter was unofficially calling Project Friendship Is Magic, though FRIDAY recorded everything Tony did, so if there was a question they could go back and check. 

Peter, however, was mentally categorizing every touch and its effects. For science, but also for some pretty unscientific reasons. Shoulder-to-shoulder on the couch or in the lab, for example, or knee-to-knee at the table—those were good. They set him at ease and calmed his thoughts when they started to race. Skin-to-skin was way better. 

Skin-to-skin for three nights in a row while they slept had allowed Tony to walk down his driveway and out the dirt road, out of sight and almost out of earshot. With Peter’s enhanced senses, of course, he could still hear Tony’s breath and the gentle scuff of his shoes in the road, but most importantly, they’d gone this far without their CPR-leash snapping them back. 

Peter jogged down the road and turned a bend to find Tony walking back toward him, rubbing his arm, looking at it thoughtfully. Of course, he was also wearing his FRIDAY glasses, so very likely he was doing more than just looking at his arm. 

Peter recognized that they needed to be able to live independently of each other, or at least not suffer debilitating pain when one of them left the room, but the way Tony approached the problem—like he could still uncover a way to undo what Peter had done—made Peter uneasy. Guilty. Embarrassed for having cared so much. For having overridden Tony’s apparent readiness to die that day.

He tried not to let those feelings linger or build up, though, because Tony would pick up on them, just as Peter could feel Tony’s eagerness to be separate from him. Tony made no effort to hide those feelings.

“You know, at this distance I bet we could go after some bad guys. Each do our thing but stay close enough that it’s safe,” Peter offered. “I’m sure Cap could use the help in New York, what with the other half of the world showing up again.” He itched to get back to his neighborhood and to May. She’d let him know they had a place again, and some of their stuff back in it, but she needed his help. Tony needed to feel like he was part of a team again instead of stuck in the woods with a kid. Peter didn’t delude himself that he was sufficient company.

“You’re not far off, kid,” Tony said without looking up. Peter was never sure anymore, when Tony said something like that, if he was responding to what Peter had said or what he was feeling. “You and I need to take this thing to the next level.”

“What do you mean?” Peter’s pulse jumped, and he did his best to squash down any of the ways he’d imagined getting closer to Tony. Not sure how safe his fantasies were these days, he tried not to indulge in them. 

Tony reached for Peter’s arm but then held Peter’s wrist so their matching scars ran alongside each other in parallel lines. “We need answers about what these are. FRIDAY can only tell me so much.” Tony scanned both their arms with his glasses. “Scar tissue. Nerve damage, some low-grade energy signature. My guess is it corresponds to the Soul Stone, but that doesn’t do us a lot of good. You picked the pickiest of the cosmic rocks—it’s not talkin’.”

“You can’t undo the sacrifice, Mr. Stark,” Peter said quietly. 

“I’m getting that, yeah. But there could be some way around it we haven’t thought of.”

Peter took a breath and said what he’d been avoiding. “I think I know who we could talk to, then.” 

“Yeah, me too.” Tony let go of his arm and shared an eye-roll with him. “That sentient cape with a wizard in it. He’s got the Time Stone right now, anyway, and Cap’s gonna need that back, so we should go collect.” Then, maybe picking up on the knots in Peter’s stomach, Tony clapped him on the shoulder. “Swing through your neighborhood on the way, huh? Put the fear of God into a petty thief or three?”

Peter tried for a smile but wasn’t too successful. “That feels like a long time ago now.”

“Yeah, well, who says you can’t go home again, right? Especially when you haven’t finished high school, and we might be breaking the law having you up here without a permission slip.”

“Those jokes about my age never get old.”

“Neither do you. I’m five years older, twenty years grayer, and you’re not even a senior yet.”

A weight that felt very much like sadness pressed on Peter, and he tried to shrug it off, for both their benefits. “When do we start?” he asked. 

Tony gave him a long look, and Peter stood a little straighter. “Let’s give it another couple days, huh? See if we can’t get this leash a little longer before we head back to the city.”

Peter nodded, and his smile felt better this time. “Sounds good to me.”

*

They sat down by the water, side by side at the firepit, and Dr. Banner had just gone off to bed. He slept in the garage/lab because he could clear a space big enough there. The log Peter and Tony sat on was plenty big, but they were pressed together from shoulder to hip. “Recharging,” Tony liked to call it. 

The warmth of the fire on Peter’s face and the front of his body made him drowsy and slow, but his back was cold, so he dragged Tony’s arm around his shoulder and wedged himself in closer against his side. 

“Better?” Tony asked, a smile in his voice. 

“Yeah.” Peter leaned forward a little and hooked his arm over Tony’s knee, and a moment later, Tony’s chin pressed into his shoulder. “It’s not all bad, right?” Peter asked, eyes on the lake. “Being like this?”

“Like what?”

“You know…cosmically linked.” He didn’t like the word _leash_. “We haven’t really explored the good stuff that could come out of it.”

“Like what?” Tony asked again, and Peter flushed. He shrugged, liking the dig of Tony’s jaw against his back. 

“Like, um. Superhero stuff. I’d know if you needed my help, and if I needed you…” He let the sentence hang. 

Tony made a quiet, considering noise. “What kind of other stuff?”

Peter couldn’t have explained it, why he did it. He only knew that it felt like the most logical thing to turn his head just a little so that Tony’s nose bumped against his cheek. He twisted a little farther and scraped the bristle of Tony’s beard against his mouth. It felt like a kiss, the way his skin buzzed and his insides fizzed. 

They stayed there for a long moment, suspended in the before-something-big. Peter opened his mouth to feel Tony’s breath pass his lips, and that felt a little more like a kiss. 

“This kind of stuff,” he finally said and put his mouth on Tony’s mouth. Tony made another sound, and Peter didn’t know what to name it, but Tony put a hand on his face and held him still through it. It was kissing, Peter was pretty sure, but they didn’t move. 

Not until Peter shifted on the log, his neck about to cramp, and Tony slid his hand from Peter’s face down his shoulder, past his elbow to his hip, to his knee, and tugged. Peter got the hint and pivoted, helped Tony pull him into his lap, so both Peter’s knees were braced against the log on either side of Tony’s hips. He breathed against Tony’s mouth, then exhaled sharply as Tony wrapped his arms around his waist. One slid beneath Peter’s shirt—Tony’s gauntlet-scarred hand rough on his back.

Peter’s eyes were shut tight, like if he looked at Tony, it would be too much, or Tony would push him away. They kissed again, by feel, mouth to mouth, and just pressing together like that, Peter felt like a—a plucked string. Or, no. Like a chord. Like the school band, when the director finally had everybody in tune, and everyone played the right note and the sound vibrated through his whole self, and he was part of something way bigger than his trumpet playing an F#. That was the link—it had to be. If kissing felt like this for everybody, no one would ever do anything else. 

He breathed faster and discovered that the press of his belly against Tony’s when they both inhaled at the same time was the most intimate thing he’d ever done in his life.

One of Tony’s hands slid from the middle of his back to his tailbone, tucking him tighter against his front, and Peter instinctively rocked forward, trapping a sound between Tony’s mouth and his. Heat sparked, and he did it again, this feeling the polar opposite of the pain of the leash snapping them back together. 

Not sure what to do with his hands, he’d kept them on Tony’s shoulder blades, but now he dug both into Tony’s hair at the back of his head. He scratched gently, and Tony shuddered against his front. And Peter wanted to live here, right in this moment, when everything felt amazing, and the end was nowhere in sight. 

He broke the kiss just enough that he could breathe easier, keeping his brow pressed to Tony’s, his eyes still shut. That end was approaching—he didn’t want it to, but he reached for it anyway, unable to stop. He rocked harder, faster, and Tony groaned. 

“Kid,” he said, voice rough.

Peter blinked by reflex and found Tony watching him with so much concentration, such careful attention that Peter nearly burned up. His breath caught, and he ducked his head, and—

And a hard shove right against his ribcage sent him sprawling backward into the dirt. His head cracked against one of the rocks ringing the firepit, and—

And he awoke with a gasp in the dark of the bedroom, sweat sticking his t-shirt to his chest and back. Tony lay next to him, turned away on his side, his breathing even and slow. Peter lay perfectly still and heard, over the pounding of his own pulse, that Tony’s was racing too. He was awake and pretending not to be.

A tight feeling in his chest drove Peter from the bed, and he was immeasurably grateful that he could get all the way out of the bedroom to the little bathroom off the kitchen. He put as much distance between himself and Tony as he could get and still be in the house and shut himself away. Slapping the light on, he squinted at himself in the mirror as his eyes adjusted. His face was flushed and shiny, and his chest lifted on quick puffs of air, though he wasn’t sure why he’d be this out of breath.

When he tried to slow his breathing, he started to cry.

The sense-memory of Tony holding onto him—hands and arms and a hard kiss that was just mouths pressed tight together—the heat of the fire at his back, and the scratch of stubble were all so vivid, Peter felt stuck in the wrong reality. It had all been a dream.

This tight feeling in his chest was grief. 

He braced both hands on the sink, and let it out—great shuddering breathes and a few messy sniffs for the impossibility of what he wanted and how close, how foolishly, he’d thought he was to having it. But how could Tony ever really want Peter when all he seemed to want was to get away from him?

*

He awoke on the couch to a silent house. He awoke to an empty house. Swinging his feet off the cushions, he pressed his elbows into his knees and scrubbed his hands through his hair. He’d slept like shit after the dream, but he had slept. Hard enough that he hadn’t even heard Tony leave—hadn’t felt him leave. 

Reflexively he reached outward. They hadn’t practiced this yet, but he closed his eyes and reached down the link, imagined holding it between his fingers like a rope—like a leash—and following it to where Tony had gone. 

Images and sensation flickered through his mind. A cool breeze, the sweet smell of grass, and the creak of car leather. He was stopped in his car, holding the door open with his foot, looking out over a field. Peter couldn’t get a clear picture of where.

“FRIDAY, where is Tony?” he asked.

“County road five,” she answered, “one-point-four miles from here.”

“One-point-four miles,” Peter echoed. That smashed their previous distance record.

His arm twinged, and he sucked in a quick breath at the flash he got of Tony standing up from the driver’s seat and striding into the field. The pain intensified, and Peter clenched his teeth shut against a groan. He flexed his hand open and shut, and refused to stand up, to get closer to Tony to bring them back into range. And a moment later, Tony dropped back into the car, digging his thumb into the inside of his arm to ease the ache.

Peter blew out his breath. Was it the dreaming that allowed them to get this much farther, or was it what they’d done in the dream? He didn’t think he could bear to ask.

*

Tony spent the rest of the day with Dr. Banner, finishing the rebuild of the time machine for Cap. Peter hovered until he determined they didn’t need or want his help, then wandered down to the lake. 

He gave the firepit a skeptical eye from the dock. There were no logs arranged around it like in his dream, just three wooden chairs that sloped backward, looked uncomfortable, and difficult to get out of. Since he’d woken up here after the battle, they’d never had a fire or sat in those chairs. 

Near the dock, under some brush and dead leaves, was a kayak, and Peter wondered if that had ever been used in the time Tony had lived here, either. Peter had never been in one before. No time like the present, though. Dragging it out, be swept off the dirt and spiderwebs with his sweatshirt sleeve and pulled the paddle free. Even without his super-strength, it was light enough that in no time at all, he’d slid it into the water, jumped inside, and glided out onto the lake. With no wind, the overcast sky reflected almost perfectly in the water, and Peter felt like he’d left the whole world behind as he paddled away from the dock. 

He tried to picture Tony out here in the years after the snap. Guilt-ridden, angry, and grieving. Alone. As long as Peter had known Tony Stark—and even before he knew him—he was always conspicuously surrounded by people. The press, the military, the Avengers, Pepper Potts, Rhodey, Happy. But he was always obviously alone, too. 

He imagined Tony in this kayak, drifting between the land and the sky, lost, while the weight of half the universe pressed down on him—and Peter was part of it. Completely out of his reach and still crushing him.

Since the dream, Tony hadn’t come near him, and Peter took the time to notice, paddling to the middle of the lake, that he didn’t feel stretched or pulled tight, like if he didn’t grab hold of Tony, he would snap in two. He felt normal. 

He thought if he ever brought up the dream to Tony, he would die of embarrassment on the spot, but he also thought ahead to tonight, thought about returning to the dream, and smiled, safely alone in his boat-for-one where no one could see him. 

*

Tony shot him sidelong looks all through dinner and cleanup, and Peter soaked them up, a pit of anticipation growing in his gut. They had to sleep together, skin to skin, to be able to function apart during the day. They had to. Peter could hardly stand the wait. 

The way Tony looked at him, and the thrum of nerves under Peter’s skin that didn’t feel quite like his own, Peter thought Tony was thinking about it too. 

When Tony said, “I’m turning in early,” Peter was sure all the blood rushed from his head fast enough to set some kind of record. He gave Tony a head start, gave him time in the bathroom, where Peter heard the toilet flush and the sink run. Then, once Dr. Banner had gone out to the garage, he followed.

When he’d shut the bedroom door behind them, he had time for one deep breath before Tony came out of the bathroom, crossed to Peter in a few quick steps, and pushed him up against the door—hooked his hands under Peter’s thighs and _lifted_ him against the door.

The breath rushed from his lungs on a sharp _huh_ , but he hooked his ankles together at Tony’s back and tipped his head back when Tony pressed his mouth, and holy shit, his tongue against Peter’s throat.

“Oh my god,” Peter said to the ceiling.

“Fuck, kid,” Tony grunted against his skin.

Peter wanted everything at once—kissing with teeth and tongue, stretched shirts, popped buttons, and bare skin. The idea of sex had, until this point, scared the shit out of him. He was seventeen, and he knew there were kids at school having it, but none of his friends were, and the most he’d done was some clumsy making out at a party before the girl had puked, and Peter’d learned in very short order how drunk was too drunk. He’d made sure she left with her friends and sworn he would never hook up at a party again.

Until he’d made a bargain with an Infinity stone, he had no idea how sex just organically happened between two sober people who liked each other. 

Was this organic, though? Did Tony feel like Peter did—like for way longer than they’d been linked, Tony was magnetic north—or was it only the link driving them?

Tony shoved Peter’s t-shirt up and fit his hands to Peter’s waist, and the rough heat of his fingers on Peter’s skin, on his stomach, had him arching away from the door. Tony nipped at his throat and said, “You know, you’re heavier than you look.”

“Thanks,” Peter said, because it felt like a compliment. 

Huffing a laugh, Tony pulled away from the wall, peeling Peter’s legs from around his hips. “Bed.”

“Yeah, great idea.” He leapt up and spun in the air to land on the bed with a bounce. With a wriggle, he stripped out of his shirt and spread his knees as Tony climbed up after him. This time, Peter met his eyes as he pulled Tony over him and gripped his sides with his knees. He traced the lines of his face beneath his glasses with his thumbs and smiled at the kindness he saw. It felt organic when they kissed. When Tony dragged his fingers against Peter’s scalp. When Tony rocked down against him, and they both moaned. 

Leaning up, Tony switched off the bedside light and settled back along Peter’s side. 

In the blue-dark of the bedroom, Peter blinked sleepily and rolled toward him, placing his hand gently at his throat. “Hey,” he said, voice rough like he’d just woken up. 

“Hey,” Tony answered, putting his hand low on Peter’s back and drawing him in. His fingers fisted in the soft material of Peter’s sleep shirt. As easy as an inhale, Peter slid forward and kissed him, his lips dry and his mouth a little sour. 

He thought he’d already taken off his shirt. And when had Tony taken off his glasses?

Tony carefully scooped Peter under him and rolled on top, deepening the kiss so that Peter felt surrounded and a little overwhelmed. But he went with it, tipping his chin up and tugging at Tony’s hair. He ran the sole of his foot up and down Tony’s leg, expecting the roughness of denim and finding soft flannel.

Tony froze above him.

Peter blinked. “Wait. Did we just…?” He squinted in the dark as reality tilted and diverged around him again. 

How had he gotten here, really?

Tony had shot sidelong looks his way all through dinner, uneasy and wary. He’d said, _“I’m turning in early,”_ and when Peter had followed a few minutes later…he’d been in bed with the light off.

Peter’d been dreaming again—with Tony.

“I don’t know,” Tony answered, and he sounded sick. “ _Fuck_.” Peter flinched as Tony shoved away from him and climbed quickly out of bed. “Get your stuff. We’re going back to New York, right now.”

“Now? It’s the middle of the night.” Peter sat up and turned the light on. He was in his PJs. His clothes from the day lay in a pile next to the bed. When had the dream started, and when had it ended? He could taste Tony’s mouth, and his lips buzzed from his beard, but was that a remembered dream or a few minutes of waking, thinking the dream was real?

“Yeah, and I’m not getting back in that bed with you, kid. You’ve got ten minutes.” Tony grabbed the jeans he’d worn the day before and a fresh shirt and slammed the bathroom door shut behind him, leaving Peter with the harshness of his own breath and the muffled sound of Tony’s through the door.

“Fuck,” Peter echoed faintly. “ _Fuck_.” Drawing his knees up, he let his head sink between them as the weight of what just happened settled around him. His stomach turned and knotted itself, and his skin prickled like he might throw up. Scrambling out of bed, he grabbed for the bag May had packed for him, throwing his clothes inside. He snatched his phone and wallet from the dresser, and fled the bedroom before Tony had emerged from the bathroom. 

*

Tony drove them back to New York in silence so thick that Peter put in his earbuds just so he didn’t make the mistake of trying to talk. He turned in the seat to face the window, and watched the lights of the city approach. It’d been five years since he was home, though it felt like a matter of weeks. The smoke and violence of the final battle seemed like it’d happened to someone else—he only had room in his head right now for the catastrophe he’d brought on himself. 

He hadn’t meant to. How was he supposed to control his dreams? If Tony was dreaming with him, how could Peter know they weren’t Tony’s to begin with?

He scoffed at himself. Because Tony Stark would never in a million years feel like that about him. A high school student. Peter had done this to Tony by using the Soul Stone to bring him back. Everything that happened as a result was his fault. He was the one to project his longtime crush into this. 

Before the link, he wouldn’t have even called it that. A crush was…irrational and embarrassing and secret. It was bullshit high school stuff, and Peter should be way past it by this point in the game. Before the link, Peter would have said he loved Tony without blinking. It was just an objective fact. Peter would move mountains and tall buildings for him. Bring him back from the dead. 

Until the link, Peter would have said Tony loved him, too. That it wasn’t in the same way, didn’t matter.

It mattered now.

Glancing at the dashboard clock, Peter caught Tony’s quick look his way and darted his gaze back out the window. It was almost four in the morning, and traffic into the city hadn’t started to pick up yet. Tony flew down the highway with all the assurance of a billionaire who didn’t care about speeding tickets. 

He drove like he was freaking out, too, and couldn’t wait to get rid of the problem in his passenger seat. 

Peter hunched in on himself a little farther, then jolted at the muffled sound of Tony’s voice and a sharp tug on his earbuds. 

“Hey!” Peter snapped, jerking away.

“Take those things out—I’m trying to talk to you.” 

Headphones were an inviolable part of any New Yorker’s personal space. Had Tony not thought the whole world revolved around and rested on his shoulders, he might have picked up on that. 

That Peter had thought of him, waking and dreaming, as magnetic north, too, did nothing to reduce his annoyance. And hurt. “I would have heard you,” he said, winding the earbuds around his fingers. “Super senses, remember?”

Tony scowled behind his glasses. “Believe me, kid, I have plenty of experience blaring music to ignore the adult in the car. Unfortunately, the adult in the car is me, so you’re just gonna have to listen for a minute.”

Peter sank a little lower in his seat. “Okay, Mr. Stark.”

Tony shot him another quick look, then a longer one as they slowed down to cross the GW Bridge. “Shit,” he said to himself. “Right, uh. I wanted to say I’m sorry.”

Peter looked over in surprise. “What? What do you have to be sorry for?”

“Let’s go with everything? I haven’t handled any of this the right way, and it’s my responsibility to do this the right way, so I’m sorry that I haven’t.”

“What would have been the right way?” Peter asked, genuinely curious.

“For starters, not putting you in the position to use a cosmic power rock to bring me back from the dead, and ending with—where we ended up last night. I shouldn’t have let things get that far.”

“You didn’t _let_ anything. Those were my choices, Mr. Stark.”

“That it was my responsibility to keep you from having to make.”

“I should be apologizing to you—” 

“No, you shouldn’t, and I’ll tell you why—you’re just a kid, and I involved you. I recruited you. This is on me.”

“I don’t get any say in this?”

“Not ‘til you’re eighteen.”

“I’ll be eighteen in—”

“But you’re _not_. Peter.” Tony’s knuckles tightened around the steering wheel as the words snapped harshly from his mouth. “You’re not old enough to think clearly or to know what you want, and even if you think you are or you do, it’s my responsibility to treat you like a kid because you are one. Whatever you—feel about me, I can’t let you act on it. Any more than I already have. Fuck.” He shook his head and glared, Peter thought, at himself.

Peter bit the inside of his lip to try to keep from speaking. Because he did think of Tony as stronger and older and just _more_ than him. Tony was in charge, and Peter was…. He didn’t know what he was, exactly. The young sidekick and occasional point-man? The protégé? He was The Kid. He liked being The Kid to Tony. He liked the way Tony said it, because _Kid_ didn’t sound like _Child_.

He was different. He was special. So was Tony Stark—but not that special.

“You’re just a guy. You know that, right? One guy.” Peter didn’t risk looking over at him. “You’re not the center of the universe. You’re not responsible for me and what I do.”

“Yeah, but if you can stop the bad stuff, and you don’t, then it happens because of you,” Tony said. “Sound familiar?”

Peter shook his head at his own words twisted and thrown back at him. “This is different.” It had to be different.

“Not to me, it isn’t. I let you down. And I’m not gonna let it happen again. I’m gonna fix this.”

“Because you’re the adult.”

“Now you’re gettin’ it.”

Peter nodded jerkily and stared out the window again. So that was that. Super-strength, enhanced senses and healing, saving the world with the Avengers, _as_ an Avenger, strong enough to wield an Infinity stone by himself, and none of it mattered because he was a minor for another year.

“I’m putting my headphones back in now, Mr. Stark,” he said quietly.

Tony blew out a deep breath. “Yeah, kid.” 

Peter still liked the way it sounded.

*

Dr. Strange lived in a crazy-awesome brownstone on Bleeker Street that was bigger on the inside. It was more like he was stationed there than lived there, really, but it was a sweet place, and if Peter had been freaking out less, he would have paid more attention to all the cool stuff inside it.

Instead he stood by while Tony gave Strange the digest version of the last couple weeks, and tried to remember if he’d told Tony that Strange already knew Peter had used the Soul Stone because Strange had been there when he used it. Had, in fact, given him the go-ahead. More or less. Hadn’t stopped him, at least.

Peter would have remembered telling him. If Peter’d told him, they probably would have come here a lot sooner. That was probably about to bite him in the ass. 

“You knew? You _knew_.”

“Yes, I watched him use it.”

“You let a kid use an Infinity Gem to bring me back from the dead.”

“I didn’t _let_ him do anything. It was his choice.”

Peter couldn’t help smiling at that and looked up to glance between Strange and Tony. He’d kind of missed Strange. Missed Tony and Strange together with their similarly shaped facial hair and egos. He’d liked feeling part of that team. Avengers in Space had been pretty cool, until it wasn’t.

“Did you look into the future again?” Tony asked. “Did you see how this turns out? _How_ could you let him go through with that?”

“Because I’m not responsible for any of the other stones, or any of the Avengers, and because I’d already sent you to your death. Peter found a way to avoid that fate, and I’m glad for it.”

“But maybe that was supposed to be my fate,” Tony said, voice sharp enough to cut Peter to the bone. “You’re Mr. Time-Space Continuum—you should care about that more than anybody.”

“I do. And you’re here now. How would you like me to help? Besides reversing Mr. Parker’s choice, which I can’t.”

“Can’t or won’t,” Tony said, and Peter bristled. 

“Can’t.”

“We reversed the snap with the gauntlet. We brought everyone back—we brought you back.”

“And who are you volunteering to use the gauntlet again? Do you really want to sacrifice yourself so badly?”

This time, Peter stiffened on Tony’s behalf. The question was too pointed, too targeted at something Tony was obviously taking care to protect. Tony’s jaw clenched and he looked away, and Peter spoke up for the first time since greeting Strange at the door.

“We’re looking for a way to bypass the link I bargained for with the Soul Stone. I brought him back, and I’m not sorry, but we’re stuck together, and we can’t live on a leash that only stretches one-point-four miles.” He said it with a steady voice and hopefully a straight face, even though his stomach clenched at the thought of losing the feel of Tony at the other end of their link. “We were hoping you could help us understand what the link is, exactly, and come up with some ideas for how to get around it.”

He shot Tony a quick look and got a grateful half-smile in answer.

Strange inclined his head in some kind of formal, wizard acknowledgment. Peter wondered if he’d always been a wizard, or if it was a recent-ish gig, like superheroing was for Peter. He certainly looked the part. “I’d like to observe your link in action, if that’s all right. See what happens at one-point-five miles, specifically. Tony, is there anything you need? Breakfast? There’re decent bagels around the corner. Though maybe you should try sleeping.”

Tony looked between them, eyebrows sloping together in a frown. “I’m going with you.”

“No, I’d like to talk to Peter since, between the two of you, he knows what he did to bring you back. We’ll return shortly. Ready?” With barely a glance at either of them, he did his gold spinning move and opened a portal to…

“Where’s that?” Peter asked. “We can’t be more than one-point—”

“Yes, I know. This was my favorite Vietnamese restaurant before the snap. It’s the correct distance from here. In you go.”

“Is patience not a virtue among wiz—” But Tony’s words were abruptly cut off as Strange pushed Peter through the portal and snapped it closed behind them. A jolt of pure panic shot through Peter’s body at the abrupt separation, but he felt no pain when he stumbled out onto a sidewalk in front of a closed Vietnamese place. 

“Whoa, that’s still wild,” he said. “Glad we’re not jumping planets this time, though. Also, it’s possible we can stretch farther than a mile-and-a-half now.” He flushed as he said it, and spun in a circle, taking in the neighborhood.

“Oh? Tony was vague on what it was that allowed you to stretch the distance you could be apart.”

“Do we have, like, doctor-patient confidentiality?”

“No.”

“Oh.” Peter frowned.

“If I need to consult with Wong, I will have to tell him the details of our conversation. Wong is many things, but a gossip isn’t one of them. Also, you saved my life, kid, so I owe you.” Strange quirked a smile that finally set Peter at ease. 

“Well, the truth is, uh.” Peter searched for the neatest, most objective way to say it. “Basically, the closer we get, the farther apart we can get. Lately, um, I think we’ve been sharing dreams, and since that started, we’ve been able to operate way more independently. We haven’t tested it yet today.”

“Since you came bursting into the Sanctum at five in the morning.”

“Right.” Peter could feel Strange watching him, but he didn’t press for further details. 

“Let’s see what your new limit is, then. We’ll start with quarter-mile increments.” Strange touched him, and they were abruptly somewhere else. Peter caught sight of a street sign—they were farther uptown.

“We could walk,” Peter suggested, his stomach flipping at the oddness of it, but Strange just scoffed, so Peter went with it. When Strange looked pointedly at his arm, he said, “Oh. Nothing—no pain.” 

“All right, next.”

Strange had switched to half-mile increments, and they’d hit three miles before pain crawled up the inside of Peter’s arm and they had to backtrack a short distance to get into range.

“Interesting.” Strange held his hand out for Peter’s arm, so he offered it, palm up. Peter blinked at the scars crisscrossing Strange’s hands, but kept his mouth shut about them. “Do you know why you brought him back?” Strange asked, tracing the red line of scar tissue up Peter’s arm without touching it.

“Of course I do.”

“Does he know why?”

Peter hesitated. “I think so. With the link, we can kind of gauge what the other is feeling. Also, I told him that I was tired of losing people I love. So.”

“So he knows you acted impulsively on adolescent feelings.”

Peter took his hand back. “Is Dr. Strange your wizard name, or are you actually a doctor?”

“I was a surgeon.”

“Cool, so you didn’t have to care about bedside manner because your patients were all unconscious.”

“Yes, exactly.”

“Are those scars why you’re not a surgeon anymore?”

“Why do you think you were able to just double the distance you can be apart?” Strange asked, electing to ignore Peter’s snotty question. He twirled his hands and blue light sparked around his fingers.

“I told you we’ve been dreaming together.”

“What about?”

Peter’s face must have been as red as a tomato. “That’s a personal question.”

“If you want my help, you should answer it.”

“Ugh.” Peter stared at his sneakers. He’d gotten himself and Tony into this mess—it was his responsibility to fix it, so he put on his big-boy underwear and answered. It felt like rolling over and showing his belly. 

“The dreams are, uh, intimate and hard to separate from reality. Last night I thought the dream was real. So when Mr. Stark and I woke up, it was confusing. I thought the dream was real,” he said again.

“Yes, and what happened?” Strange pressed.

Peter rubbed the bridge of his nose, hiding behind his hand. “We kissed, I think.”

“You think?”

“Or it may have been part of the dream,” he said impatiently, hating how exposed he felt without Tony around. “I told you, it was really hard to tell.”

“But you think you kissed.”

“Yeah.” He considered bolting past the limit of the leash so that it yanked him back so hard he blacked out. That excruciating pain would have been preferable to this.

“What did you ask from the stone?” Strange asked, mercifully changing tactics. He hadn’t taken his eyes off Peter’s arm as he waved his hand over the mark. “What were your exact words?”

“I didn’t really talk to it,” Peter answered. “But I knew that Tony would try to take my place if he could, and I knew that I wanted us to both be able to stay, so that’s what I asked for—Mr. Stark and I together.”

“Hence, the leash,” Strange said, eyebrows lifting. “A literal interpretation of your request.” He stretched Peter’s arm out, then tugged the sleeve of his t-shirt away to see the mark disappear into his armpit. “And being intimate lengthens the tie, presumably by deepening the emotional connection you have. Deepening it even in sleep when you’re unable to resist its pull.”

“Do you think it’s making Mr. Stark feel things he doesn’t want to?” Peter asked, a pit opening in his stomach. He’d dreamed this fear, too. “Am I making him feel what I feel?”

Strange glanced up. “Why would I know the answer to that?”

“Well, you’ve been waving your magic blue fingers over my arm. What are they telling you?”

“Not sure yet. Step over here for a moment, please.” Strange put his hand on Peter’s shoulder, and they were somewhere else again—somewhere too far. Way too far. 

Peter’s whole body burned, and he dropped like a stone, curling in on himself in agony. Helpless and useless to Tony, whose pain echoed and screamed in his muscles. Dimly, he perceived Strange looming over him with his stupid blue fingers, then blackness swallowed him. The pain didn’t stop.

*

He came around to an arm across his middle and warmth all along his back. He recognized instantly the way Tony pushed his nose into Peter’s hair when he was waking up and tried not to begin the countdown to when Tony would realize what he was doing and yank himself away. Judging by the faint tremor in Tony’s arm, they were both a little on the shaky side. And they were not alone.

Strange had deposited them on a clammy, ancient-looking, brown leather couch and now stood over them. Peter wondered how long they’d been out. 

“Did Cloak and Dagger here just try to murder us?” Tony slurred into Peter’s ear, making no move to pull away from him.

“Only a little,” Strange answered before Peter could say anything. Peter threaded his fingers through Tony’s and squeezed, a surge of warmth spreading through him from the touch.

“Whatever happened to the Hippocratic oath, huh?” Tony asked, carefully sitting up and tugging his hand free.

“I’m no longer practicing medicine. And by waiving a few ethical guidelines, I was able to determine what’s wrong with you.” Strange said it like he was Sherlock Holmes about to make the reveal, so Peter braced himself. “The Soul Stone anchored Tony to you, Peter, using your heart meridian. The good news is there should still be a way for you to operate almost independently from each other.”

“What’s the bad news?” Peter asked. He mentally started that countdown for when Tony would impulsively agree to whatever it took to be rid of him, regardless of the method.

“The bad news is you and Tony need to be completely joined first. Maybe that’s not bad news at all; I’m not interested in prying. But I expect sexual intercourse coupled with a genuine commitment from the both of you will do it. I would be interested in the results of your experimentation on that front.”

“Out of the question,” Tony said. “Next.”

Strange hesitated, and Peter’s heart sank. “Next…there are techniques for bypassing or blocking a meridian.”

“And what’s the bad news?” Peter asked again. He drew his knees in, as if he could curl around the link itself.

“You’ll be blocking your heart meridian.” Strange shrugged. “There will be side effects.”

Tony pushed himself off the couch, wobbled slightly, and found his balance. “I like the sound of that. When do we start?”

“It sounds dangerous,” Peter said, a desperate note in his voice. “Mr. Stark, we should think this through before jumping into something we don’t understand. I mean, what even is a meridian?”

Tony rounded on him so fast, Peter jolted back. “Don’t even start with me about jumping into something you don’t understand, kid.” All the kindness Peter had seen in his eyes had hardened to something brittle and damaged and afraid, and Peter hugged himself against it. When Tony clapped Strange on the shoulder and led him out of the room, Peter didn’t try to follow.

*

In the end, Dr. Strange offered them a two-part solution—he could bypass the link temporarily with his own spell, but they both had to learn how to maintain it. Peter didn’t really listen to the details. He was certain Tony had it all memorized and would make sure Peter got it right when the time came. Something about acupressure points and using the energy of the universe flowing through him. 

Peter wanted no part of it. Ironically, he missed the early days of the link, when Tony had tried to pull them apart by hand and would come back to Peter only to keep them from blacking out. He remembered Tony lying half-across him and feeling like there was nothing else in the universe he needed. Just Tony’s ribs pushing against his as he breathed. He’d give anything to be back there in the woods outside Tony’s lake house. 

When Strange determined that Tony was ready to maintain the spell on his own, it’d been nearly a week since they’d slept together. That old stretched feeling had returned, making Peter short-tempered and bitchy. Enough so that he finally had the guts to corner Tony on the roof of the Sanctum.

He was seated in a rickety wooden chair, practicing their meditation technique, but he opened his eyes when Peter knelt in front of him and reached for both his hands. When he’d clasped them where they sat palm-up on his knees, Peter’s headache faded, and the deep breath he took cleared most of the ugliness from his chest. Tony’s shoulders relaxed too.

They stayed there in the not-silence of the city, the sounds of people below living their lives a comfort to Peter’s senses, until finally he said, “Do you hate me for what I did?” He kept his gaze on their joined hands until Tony’s silence stretched, and he looked up. “Mr. Stark?”

Tony still didn’t answer, but when Peter reached across the link, he came up against a blank, smooth wall. 

“What—”

“Wanted you out of my head before I answered that one,” Tony said.

“How’d you learn to do that?” Peter asked. “What are you doing?”

“I’m ‘using the energy of the universe that flows through us all,’” Tony answered, mouth twisting slightly in a smirk as he affected Strange’s voice. “Somebody wasn’t paying attention in their wizard lessons.” 

“That’s because I don’t want to be separated from you,” Peter said. The words tripped and fell out, so heavy he hung his head. “I don’t want to do this.”

“Pete…”

“I love you, _so much_ , and you hate me.”

“I don’t hate you.”

“You hate what I did. Which I only did because I love you, so I don’t really see the difference. I’m making you feel what I feel, and you hate that, too. And you should.” Tony shook his head, but Peter pushed ahead, needing to finish. “You wanted to die, and I took that away from you.”

“I told you I didn’t want to die, kid—quit putting words in my mouth.”

“Then talk to me!” Peter looked up at him. “Please, Mr. Stark, before this is over, and you have no reason to ever talk to me again.”

“All right, enough with the melodrama. Jesus, I envy your knees.” He grunted as he slid off the chair and knelt down with Peter on the roof. Hands still joined, Tony looked him in the eye, and said, “I didn’t want to die that day, but I was ready. You get me?” He didn’t have his glasses on, and the lines around his eyes deepened as he squinted against the bright, overcast sky. 

Peter shook his head. “Tell me.”

Tony exhaled, looking out over the city instead of at Peter. “Everything I’ve done. All the shitty decisions, with huge, terrible consequences. The lives lost because of me—I could finally, _finally_ do this one thing. And then I’d never make a bad call again. Never try to help and make everything ten thousand times worse. I was so ready for that, Pete. Do you understand?” He looked back at Peter, waiting.

Peter didn’t understand. “You’ve only ever tried to make the world better, Mr. Stark. Safer. And no one’s done a better job. _No one_.”

Tony’s mouth pressed into a sad smile, and he shook his head. “I question your data and your sources.”

“The source is me. It’s my data.” Peter realized he was crying a little but didn’t want to let go of Tony’s hands. “I know what I’m talking about.”

Tony watched him, eyes so sad that Peter could hardly bear it. He didn’t need the link to know what Tony was thinking.

“You couldn’t have saved me,” Peter said. “You couldn’t have kept me from getting bitten before I even knew you. I was all in on the superhero gig when we met. You showing up at the apartment, getting to fight beside you and learn from you—it’s the best stuff I’ve ever done. If you hadn’t come along, I’d have been in even worse trouble. Less prepared.”

“You would have stayed a friendly neighborhood Spider-Man instead of jumping onto spaceships,” Tony said doggedly.

And Peter was so tired of this guilt Tony carried, tired for him, and tired of feeling it, that he leaned across their knees and kissed him instead of arguing anymore. 

His blood _sang_. His whole body vibrated, and maybe Strange was onto something with that energy-of-the-universe bit, because Peter _felt_ it.

Tony felt it too. The smooth wall around his emotions flickered and vanished as he angled deeper into the kiss. He wedged one of his knees between Peter’s and put a hand on his side, squeezing hard once before he made a sharp sound against Peter’s lips and turned his mouth aside. 

“Don’t do that again,” he said roughly, brow still pressed to Peter’s.

“It could just be like this,” Peter said desperately. Stupidly. “If we just…if you just…you could have your life, and I could have mine, but we’d be this, too, and it’d be amazing and so much safer than your plan with Dr. Strange. I hate that plan, Mr. Stark. Tony,” he tried, tasting the name out loud. 

“Kid,” Tony said, and sat back on his heels, a clear warning in his voice. “I have historically terrible impulse control, but I’ve been working real hard on it these last couple years, and you’re not gonna be the one to break it. I’d never forgive myself. Or you.”

 _This plan feels pretty fucking impulsive_ , Peter wanted to say, _based on compulsive guilt and one hell of a savior/martyr complex_. He’d taken a psych class—okay, a high school psych class, but he knew the words and had spent enough time living in Tony’s emotions to apply them. 

He’d also learned he didn’t get to say things about acting impulsively.

“If there’s a way for you to have your own life,” Tony pressed, “without getting completely tangled up in mine, I’m gonna go for it. And the most important thing—” He brushed his knuckles against Peter’s chest, a strange, gentle touch through his t-shirt. “The most important thing, Peter, is you can’t stop me. However much you want to. You saved my life, but you can’t make me do this with you.”

His touch and his tone might have seemed gentle, but Tony may as well have reached into Peter’s chest and stopped his heart from beating—like Peter had seen somebody in a movie do with a grandfather clock when a person died. Reach inside and stop the pendulum from swinging. Stop the clock. Game over.

He nodded jerkily. “You’re right, obviously. Sorry. Yeah.” He pushed to his feet, and the weight of his own selfishness, his covetousness, made him stumble as he finally recognized it. He really was forcing his own feelings onto Tony, dragging him into something he wanted no part of. He was a monster.

But he righted himself. “We can do this whenever you’re ready,” he said and retreated into the Sanctum. Tony didn’t try to stop him. He didn’t say anything at all.

*

No matter what he might think, Mr. Stark was a good teacher. Peter was just too stubborn or too proud or too…too young to see it until Tony had no choice but to rub his face in the mess he’d made. As he lay on the table with his right arm out and Wong-the-Librarian pressing on his funny bone in a way Peter found deeply unsettling, he contemplated the selfishness of bringing Tony back from the dead. And not just bringing him back—binding him to Peter’s body. To his soul, even.

Who had he done it for? The rest of the world? Maybe. Iron Man was Earth’s greatest Avenger. Sure, Cap and Thor, but Thor wasn’t even from Earth, and Peter would never trust Steve Rogers after Germany, even if he had been sure he was doing the right thing. 

Could Peter have said he was sure he was doing the right thing, when he bargained with the Soul Stone? The world needed Iron Man, and Peter would argue, Tony Stark, but did that mean it was the right thing to do, bringing him back after he’d made what he thought was his final sacrifice? Black Widow had intimidated the heck out of Peter, and she’d sacrificed herself in the fight before he could really get a read on her. Nobody had brought her back, to his knowledge.

All this time, since the final battle, Tony’s exhaustion had dragged at Peter’s body. He hadn’t recognized it at first, but eventually he’d known it wasn’t his. Peter never felt this tired. This…finished. And he’d stolen that from Tony. Five years of grief and then a frantic, desperate plot to save half the universe, and just when he’d dragged himself over the finish line, Peter had caught him by the ankle and pulled him back.

Peter had done it for the world, yeah, but he’d done it for himself. Because he couldn’t face living without Tony. He’d lost both his parents and his uncle Ben, but he’d never been in a position to do anything about that loss. Almost no one in the universe had ever been in that position. What gave him the right?

As Wong pressed on the sequence of pressure points Peter needed to memorize to basically shut out his heart meridian, his face burned in humiliation at the profound selfishness of what he’d done. Tony was like Frodo at the end of the Lord of the Rings. He’d saved the world, but not for himself to live in. And Peter had—

“All right, enough of that,” Strange said briskly from where he stood over Tony, finishing the same procedure on him. “That wretchedness you feel right now is the blockage of the heart meridian. It’s the seat of emotional health and wellbeing, so in blocking it, you effectively bypass the link between you, but you also remove your sense of emotional stability and equilibrium.” Finished with Tony, he turned to regard Peter, as if Peter needed to hear this more than anybody. “Basically, you’ll be a hot mess until you adapt.”

“Yeah, what else is new?” Tony grumbled, sitting up from his table and shrugging back into a flannel shirt. He rubbed his arm absently and didn’t look at Peter.

Peter couldn’t feel him at all.

And even if this misery had been brought on by what Wong had just done to him, it felt entirely legit and earned. Peter had done this to Tony. He’d done it to himself. And he had to get out of this room. Preferably out of the city. As soon as humanly possible. If Tony wanted to excise him from his life because Peter was a selfish, immature brat, that was exactly what he’d get.

Peter jumped off the table. “I need to go home, right now,” he said, voice wobbling, emotions all over the place and clattering noisily in his head. Just in his head. He couldn’t even look at Tony as he fled the room.

*


	2. Chapter 2

Tony tracked Peter’s suit as it left the city, Peter presumably with it, and held his breath for what felt like an entire twenty-four hours. He stared at his arm, waiting for pain to seize him, to reach his heart and finally stop it because Peter was gone. In almost fifty years, only a super-charged gauntlet had managed to stop Tony’s heart, but watching that blinking dot cross the state on a Greyhound bus route came damn close.

It was August, and four months had passed since Tony’d snapped his fingers, saved the world, died, and come back attached to a seventeen-year-old. To _the_ seventeen-year-old in his life.

FRIDAY tracked Peter’s spider suit to a community college in western New York—the farthest the kid could get from the city without venturing into the weirdness of the Buffalo-Niagara Falls area. The farthest he could get from Tony and still receive in-state tuition. 

He hadn’t even started his senior year of high school. Of course, that hadn’t stopped Tony from going to MIT at fourteen. Peter had the brain and the stubborn streak, if not the cash, to attempt something similar, and Tony expected him to take RIT by storm before the next academic year.

He wanted to be proud. A part of him was proud—both for the way Peter had made the adult decision to put Tony in his rearview mirror as soon as he was physically able, and for the way Tony, himself, had managed to let him do it. Almost without obsessive surveillance. 

Not without a few of his other greatest hits, though. 

Strange had warned him that blocking his heart meridian would fuck with his emotional stability. To which Tony had replied, “What emotional stability?” A day without feeling like he was king of the world and also the already-stepped-in dog shit outside his Manhattan apartment was a day without a “Y” at the end—he’d never lived one.

So, he was almost proud, of Peter and of himself. He was coping. Functional alcoholism helped. So did meaningless sex with people of a more similar demographic to himself. Also diving into work to the neglect of everything else but the previous two. 

“You know, the greatest hits.”

“Glad you can still knock out all three,” Rhodey said dryly, lifting his beer in a toast. “You’ve always been an overachiever.”

“Right? Thank you for saying that.” Tony raised his tumbler of scotch in answer. “Your suit’s as good as I can get it without a complete rebuild and a military contract. This scotch is giving me warm fuzzies, and if I didn’t know you’d turn me down, I’d proposition you.” 

That, at least, wouldn’t be random or meaningless. If it weren’t for Rhodey’s receding hairline and the creases by his eyes, Tony could almost pretend they were back in their first apartment—Tony just eighteen and already into his bullshit, Rhodey, at twenty-one, already into his late-thirties. He’d turned Tony down then, too.

“You’re damn right I would,” Rhodey said, probably sensing the edge in Tony’s voice. “I gotta get back to DC tonight, even if that weren’t a terrible idea.”

Yeah, scratch that. Tony felt about a million years removed from their MIT days. They hadn’t been like that back then, and Tony was just feeling desperate and exposed now. Lonely.

“DC, yeah, of course,” Tony said, waving his hand. “I’ve gotta…have something that I should be working on, too.” 

Rhodey snorted a laugh. “You, Strange, and Wanda are the last Avengers in New York. There’s plenty you could be doing if you’d pull your head outta—”

“Hey, come on—”

“—that bottle,” Rhodey finished, giving it a sidelong look.

“I’ve had a rough couple months.”

“Yeah, you have.”

“I was ready to retire.”

“I know, Tony.”

He almost opened his mouth and spilled out the rest. _I was dead. I was as retired as it gets._ But it turned out, the only people who knew that were Bruce Banner and Peter Parker. And Strange, so probably also Wong. Because apparently, Strange had sort of stopped time while he and the kid debated which stone to use to bring him back. As far as anybody else knew, he’d just gone into a three-day coma after using the gauntlet. 

He was keeping his link to Peter on the DL, too, because that was just…well, it was weird. And personal. 

“I miss ‘em, too, you know,” Rhodey said. 

Tony blinked back to the conversation and realized who he was supposed to be thinking about. Who Rhodey thought he was thinking about. Cap had taken all the stones back to their rightful places in history, then taken his retirement. He still missed Vision/Jarvis like a phantom limb. And Nat…. Christ. He couldn’t stand to think too long about Nat.

“I didn’t think I really had friends until they were gone,” he said quietly, with more honesty than he intended. 

“What’d you think they were all this time?” Rhodey asked, not including himself in their number because Rhodey predated everybody.

Tony shrugged and forced a short laugh. “Oh, you know. What narcissist can ever really conceive of anybody outside themselves?”

“Yeah, well, you’re the most selfless narcissist I know,” Rhodey said generously. 

“That’s maybe the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.”

“You just fixed up my suit for free and got me all in my feelings, so. I’m in a generous mood.”

“You’re welcome.” Tony glanced over, just to make sure Rhodey was looking at him. He was, and they grinned at each other before Rhodey pushed up from the table.

“Hey, you heard from the kid lately?” he asked, striding over to where he’d hung his jacket by the door to Tony’s lab. His leg braces could use an upgrade, too, Tony decided. He should get to work on a new, slimmer set that could go under his clothes if Rhodey wanted them to—oh, or look like pants to begin with. “I thought he was gonna become a full-fledged Avenger, but he hasn’t been in touch.”

Tony pulled up his drafting program to distract himself. “He’s in Rochester, which is apparently a place people go to on purpose.”

“What’s he doing there?”

“I believe he is attending community college instead of finishing high school.”

“Shit, he really does wanna be just like you.”

Tony tried to hide a wince inside a shrug as he pulled up the old schematics to Rhodey’s braces. “Let’s hope not.”

“Come on, you know he does, and you love having a mini-me. Best thing to happen to your ego since congressional testimony.” Tony frowned, started flicking away elements of the old design, and didn’t offer comment. “Rochester’s pretty far, though. Wasn’t he planning on MIT? You couldn’t get him in early?”

“He didn’t want my help,” he answered shortly, desperate for a change in topic. “Guess he got tired of me.” 

“With your level of bullshit? That’s so hard to imagine,” Rhodey said, shooting Tony another quick smile. 

“Good thing your tolerance is so high,” Tony answered in kind. 

“Yeah, we never fight.” 

Rhodey’d parked the Iron Patriot on the roof of the penthouse apartment after taking it for a test-drive, so Tony walked him up. The place had been a Stark property for longer than Tony had been alive, and he’d avoided it since his parents died, but with the Avengers Compound destroyed and the Tower sold, this had seemed like the place to come if he wanted to stay in New York. 

Though New York didn’t really feel like itself without Peter Parker in it.

*

The kid at least seemed to be making friends, if his social media was anything to go by. Halfway into Peter’s first semester, Tony had made a habit of checking before he went to bed. Not a weird habit to have developed at all. Check the headlines, tech markets, and see what pictures Peter had posted to his feed.

Tony started to recognize the handles of Peter’s high school friends and a few of his new crew in the comments, but mostly he noticed the wildness in Peter’s eyes, rimmed with red and shadowed underneath, like sleeping was not a priority.

Sleeping had never been a priority for Tony, not now, and certainly not his freshman year of college, but that didn’t keep his fingers from twitching to have FRIDAY dial him up and check in. She kept him updated on the location of the Spider suit, and it stayed in Peter’s closet, which either meant that he’d hung it up while in a strange city, or he went out to patrol as someone other than Spider-Man, in some getup that Tony hadn’t made to protect him and keep him safe. Something Tony couldn’t track. 

He’d put money on the second one, given the givens. 

A few of the pics featured the kid at parties, and though he was smart enough not to post anything with alcohol in hand, Tony recognized the signs in the casual way he touched his friends. A geek-chic girl on his lap, his arm around her waist. And, Jesus, there he was perched on some bro’s knee, looking into the camera like he was daring Tony to look back. 

Which was stupid, and if either Rhodey or Pepper were here, they’d take the opportunity to remind Tony that the world did not and never had revolved around him. The kid was just being a kid. And kids these days were different. They didn’t care about labels the way they used to. Peter was comfortable in his skin.

Except Peter had also reached through death and bound Tony’s soul to him, so forgive him for thinking that maybe they were a little obsessed with each other. In every picture, Peter looked the opposite of comfortable in his skin—he looked ready to crawl out of it. 

Tony wondered how well the kid was dealing with the spell Strange had taught them, how well he was adapting. He’d always been such a happy kid, and Tony had forced him to upset that balance. After Peter’d forced a few things on him.

In the first weeks after Strange had helped them, Tony kept instinctively reaching for that bottomless supply of warmth and confidence and affection that lived at the other end of the link. He’d gotten used to Peter’s unshakable love, to the point that sometimes he forgot the impossibility of it.

He reached now because…just because. He never found anything, which he told himself was a very good thing. He tried not to think what three hundred miles was doing to the link between them. What did pain that couldn’t be felt do to a body over time?

*

Tony knew he was dreaming, because he was in a college dorm, there were kids having sex on the narrow bed in the corner, and Tony did not get himself into these kinds of situations anymore. It was fuzzy and slow, dim and blurred in that way some dreams were, like he wasn’t all the way under. Nothing like the sharply perfect dreams he’d shared with Peter, where reality had blended so seamlessly, Tony still couldn’t have separated them. Those had scared the shit out of him. This felt safer. Just a random sex dream.

He got a little closer, or tried. His legs moved like the floor was made of soup, and all he could do was watch: two boys on the bed, only half out of their clothes, grinding on each other like the world would end if they didn’t get off. 

The kid on top backed up onto his knees and stuck his hand into the front of his jeans, dropped his head back on a groan that Tony couldn’t hear. Sound in the dream was strange, just static-filled silence.

Tony knew the arc of that throat and the sounds that came out of it. He shook his head, blinked his eyes hard and—

—he was back in his own bed. With a groan, he rolled over, glanced at his clock, and shut his eyes again—

—and was right back in that dorm room with Peter and…. That was the bro from the picture Tony had seen. They were sitting up on the bed now, Peter in the other kid’s lap kissing him like he could get all the way inside with just his tongue.

Tony forced his eyes open again, but he felt drugged and rather than keep fighting it, he let himself be sucked back under, to Peter’s room. This dream was no threat with Peter safely across the state. This was only in his head. Just some lingering weirdness from seeing these two together in pictures.

The bro tipped Peter over onto his back, stripped his jeans down his hips and—Tony didn’t try to look away—clumsily sucked him down. Peter opened his mouth on a silent moan, flopped his arm over his eyes and bucked his hips in a stuttering rhythm so that Tony had no doubt what was happening. When the curve of his spine had eased back to the mattress, he lifted his arm and, Tony would swear, looked right at him. The kid jolted hard, like he’d seen a ghost and—

Tony blinked awake, alone in his room and hard as nails. 

*

“What do you think it means that I cheated death? Or the kid did. Whatever. What are the consequences for the universe? You’ve gotta have an opinion on this.” Tony sucked hard on his straw and glanced over at Strange. Thankfully he’d replaced the moody cape with a jacket for their November stroll through Washington Square Park. 

“You mean, you had ulterior motives for buying me this gross smoothie? I’m shocked.” Strange kept his voice dry as the desert, but also kept drinking the smoothie.

“Hey, don’t knock the kale. I swear I’ve got kale in my veins. Also whiskey. They’re what keeps me going. Now, come on. Space-time continuum. Go.”

“You’re asking why I didn’t stop Peter from bringing you back, and I already told you. His actions aren’t my responsibility. He didn’t alter a timeline. And I didn’t want you to die, either.”

“But you saw me die.” It felt good to say it out loud, to be able to say it out loud. “In your vision quest thing, you saw it.”

“No, I saw you use the gauntlet to defeat Thanos. I saw what it did to you. I smelled your burning flesh, and I moved on to the next alternative, hoping for a better one.”

Tony made a face. “Reasonable.” He looked down at his scarred hand, the skin rough and leathery. But his fingers still worked, which was more than could be said for Bruce post-gauntlet. He was only just out of the sling. He’d bet Peter’s bargain with the Soul Stone had something to do with it.

“I looked for a future where we won and you lived, and I thought there were none. I’m happy to be wrong.”

Tony huffed a frustrated sound. “And I’m—flattered, I guess, that you think I’m worth keeping around, given your earlier, dire threats about the Time Stone, but—”

“But you wish he’d let you go,” Strange finished. 

“I don’t _know_ ,” Tony answered. “I wish…” He trailed off, still unsure how to finish.

“We don’t get to pick our time, Tony.”

“Neither do seventeen-year-old kids.”

Strange nodded, but then said, “I rewound time to save the city of Hong Kong and to keep the planet from being devoured by ancient forces of darkness, so.” 

Tony’s eyebrows shot up. He opened his mouth and no sound came out.

“Don’t tell anyone.” Strange slanted him a conspiratorial look, and all Tony could do was sputter. Strange shrugged. “Sometimes we do get to pick.”

“Jesus.” Tony pressed on the bridge of his nose and held onto the belief that the earth under his feet was still solid. “Try not to let that go to your head, I guess?” he said and laughed.

“Says the guy who—what was it— _privatized world peace_?”

“Ugh.” He could feel Strange smirking at him. “I just feel like—there are consequences to what happened here that we haven’t thought through. Like.” He looked up, heart clenching. “I’m thirty years older than the kid, and we’re tied up in ways nobody quite understands. What happens when I die again, because I’m ninety? Or seventy? Do we live and die together? Am I gonna kill Peter Parker when he’s forty years old?” 

“That is an excellent question,” Strange admitted. “More likely, you’ll live until _he_ dies, since the Soul Stone bound you to him.”

“I don’t wanna live to be 110! Or worse—he’s got superpowers. We could be talking a buck-fifty before I kick the bucket. Promise you’ll murder me before then.”

“I promise I will murder you before then,” Strange answered, so easily that Tony squinted at him. 

“…Thanks.” 

“Both your and my deaths have involved the Soul Stone, as has Peter’s. When you die, the Soul Stone will still lay claim to you. Do you fear it?”

“Are you asking me if I fear _death_?”

“You bought me this smoothie so you could ask difficult questions. I have some, too.” Strange cocked an eyebrow.

Tony heaved a sigh. “Yes, and I have regrets about that decision. Ummm, I don’t know. I fear helplessness more than anything. Which means for the last decade, give or take, I’ve been scared out of my fucking mind, because I knew what was coming. But it came, and I’m still here, so. No, I guess I don’t fear death, specifically. Why, do you?”

Strange shook his head. “Not as such, no. Looking through fourteen million futures, I’ve seen it and lived it.”

“Then what?”

“You came to me for help, not because you care about what I fear. Let’s not get sidetracked.”

“I’m not sure…either of those things are true.” Tony frowned.

“Then you wanted me to validate your feelings?”

“Now we’re getting warmer.”

“Would you like to get into why Peter’s love for you makes you so uncomfortable?”

“No, definitely not.”

“Does he make you feel helpless in some way? Why, after you’ve faced your greatest fear, are you still afraid?”

“All right, smoothie date’s over. I’m out.” He’d been about to mention that he’d started dreaming with Peter again, though not like before they blocked the link. He’d been about to ask for help. But the moment had blown way beyond past. Strange already knew more than enough about his relationship with the kid. Tony would sort this out himself. 

He tapped his chest twice to activate his suit.

Strange raised his eyebrows. “Touched a nerve, did I?”

“It’s been weird,” Tony not-answered and took off for his side of Manhattan.

*

His scarred hand shook a little with the weight of his phone in it, Peter’s number staring at him somehow accusingly. He could have had FRIDAY make the call, obviously, but she’d have already done it, and this way, Tony could dick around and practice what he wanted to say.

“Fuck it,” he muttered. His thumb twitched, and the call went through.

It went all the way through to voicemail. 

No precious greeting with a Star Wars reference or Ned yelling in the background. Just: _Hey, it’s Peter. Leave a message._

Tony’s thumb hovered over the end-call button, but then he cleared his throat. “Hey, kid. It’s me…Tony.” He squeezed his eyes shut and glared at himself. “Uh, just checking in. Wanted to make sure you were okay—make sure things are holding up alright on your end. I’m experiencing, uh, experiencing a little bleed-through at night sometimes. A little alarming. Not sure what’s going on there. I think it’d be good to check in.”

He hesitated. “Also, I hope your holidays were nice. Thought maybe I’d see you around town. But, uh, it’s a big city. Anyway, Happy New Year. Stay warm out there in that western hellscape. I think you get like four hours of sunshine annually.”

Then he hung up before he kept going with the bullshit pleasantries. 

That night, he found himself in Peter’s dorm room again. It wasn’t always Peter’s. The details varied just enough for Tony to notice—at first, he thought, because he didn't know the details so his brain made them up. But then he realized, Peter was in different rooms with different kids because Peter was sleeping around.

Were Peter and Tony dreaming together that he was sleeping around? Were these Peter’s fantasies or Tony’s? They didn’t feel like his own, not like the ones from the summer. They felt more like the result of gravity, a pull too strong to keep him away.

Tonight, Peter was on the bed with the bro from the first dream, Peter on his knees, his hands braced against the wall. The guy had him by the hips, and Tony had to look away as Peter’s back bowed and his fingers flexed against the wall. His head dropped between his shoulders, and Tony was never so thankful that none of these dreams had a soundtrack as right then. 

Maybe Peter actually was fucking his way through campus, and when Tony slept, he was witness to it. Maybe this wasn’t even technically dreaming, but the link pulling Tony into Peter's bedroom to make sure they shared this, too, even though they were apart. 

Jesus, there was a thought. Had the kid also witnessed Tony's one-night-stands? 

Tony squirmed at that, but not nearly as much as he should have. Then, like Peter'd tugged the leash, Tony looked back up at him on the bed. 

He was eighteen, and it was just a date on a calendar. Just a number. It didn’t make any real difference. He'd done far more to age himself this year than turn eighteen—and he was fucking perfect. He always had been, but Tony’s scarred-up heart beat wildly at the sight of him, here in this context.

Maybe he needed bitterness in the people he loved, roughness. And wasn’t it just the kicker that Tony had scuffed the kid’s wide-eyed innocence himself? Tony had pushed him away, he’d thought, for his own good, and Peter had done this. That Tony was even here had to be his fault, too.

Pushing that guilt off for when he woke up, he slid his hand under the waistband of his sweats to cup himself, and he could swear Peter shivered right as he did it. He got his scarred hand around his dick and thought, Peter had done this to both of them. It was only fair that they both suffer for it. 

At an especially rough shove from the bro—Tony didn’t want to dig up his name because that felt like jealousy—Peter went to one elbow against the wall and slid a hand down to touch himself. He rested his head on the back of his hand and turned just enough that it almost seemed like he was looking for Tony, red-rimmed eyes searching. 

The static fuzz of the dream had cleared some, and Tony felt his body more. _I'm here,_ he thought. _I see you._ Maybe Peter knew exactly what he was doing.

Tony dropped into the desk chair and rocked back in it, and wow, they hadn’t changed the design of these things since his own college days. Maybe this school had inherited them from his college days. 

Peter was definitely watching him. Tony looked him right in the eye. 

_You’re pretty fucked up, kid, you know that?_

Peter’s smile was instant and sharp, as if that were a compliment, and he hardly blinked, eyes locked with Tony’s, as the bro drilled him into next week. 

Tony came awake not long after, on his stomach with his hand inside his underwear and a wet mess leaking through to the sheet.

So, that had been intense.

He looked at the clock on the nightstand. Definitely too early to get in the suit and fly to Rochester. Rolling out of bed with a groan, Tony headed for the shower. It’d been six months since he’d seen Peter, and it was past time to pay a visit.

*

He decided it would be pretty strange and also terrible for Peter’s cover if Iron Man landed on the roof of his dorm and asked to be buzzed in at the front desk as a guest. So Iron Man flew to Rochester, then Tony Stark rented a car, just like anybody else. He parked in the visitor lot even though it was a weekend and walked across the well-worn, concrete-heavy campus toward Peter’s dorm. Mountain ranges of snow lined the sidewalks, blindingly white in the late January sun. Tony guessed it had snowed the night before. He guessed it snowed all the fucking time up here.

On the way, he texted, _Got a minute? I’m downstairs_.

But before he got close, motion from the corner of his eye caught his attention, and he turned to see Peter standing on the path through the quad, wary and guarded like his sentence was about to be handed down.

“Hey, kid,” Tony said, when Peter didn’t move a muscle. 

“Mr. Stark,” he answered, his voice stiff.

Taking off his sunglasses, Tony squinted against the glare, just to see if Peter was as pale as he looked. And, yup. “You look terrible. I’m positive that dining hall can feed you as much as will fit in your stomach, so…”

“Don’t have much appetite, I guess,” he said, drifting closer. He was lumpy in his heavy winter coat, and he’d never been a big kid, but the smudges under his eyes and the sharp angles of his face were new, Tony was sure. “What are you doing here?” Peter said.

“I could ask you the same thing.”

“Are you asking me?”

Tony smirked. “Yeah, I’m asking.”

“I asked you first.”

“All right, fair.” Tony rolled his eyes, not liking the coldness in Peter’s voice or posture, even if he deserved it. “But I’d rather not chat in front of an audience, and you picked a school in the Arctic, so let’s get inside. Your roommate around this weekend?”

Peter was almost within arm’s reach, close enough that Tony noticed he’d hit a growth spurt. He looked starving. He shook his head. “No, he’s got a girlfriend he goes home for.”

“Perfect, let’s go.” He motioned for Peter to follow him, and Peter fell into step with him, shooting him quick sidelong looks like he couldn’t quite believe what he was seeing. The silence held between them as they climbed the stairs to Peter’s third-floor room and Peter shut them inside. He shrugged out of his coat and hung it from a hook on the back of the door. Tony hadn’t really dressed for the weather, so he kept his leather jacket on. 

Shoving his hands in the pockets he hugged it more tightly closed and wondered what the hell he was thinking coming out here, especially given the way Peter was looking at him. It set his heart racing. It scared the shit out of him, but what didn’t?

Peter seemed to see all of this, and his expression cracked. He turned away, shoulders hunched, as if Tony had just confirmed every awful thing Peter assumed he thought of him. Feeling like a dick, he pulled his hands from his pockets. He caught Peter by the inside of his elbow, felt the kid’s whole body tighten as he turned back. His face pinched and miserable, full of pain and anger, Peter looked about to break.

And Tony knew why. “That’s why I’m dreaming with you again,” he said. “You aren’t keeping up the block.”

Peter yanked his arm free. “Of course, I am,” he said harshly. “You think I’d be able to function if I weren't?”

“I don’t know what all you’re capable of, Pete. It’s one of the most amazing things about you.”

Peter’s eyebrows drew together, and his face twitched like he’d just thought about smiling. Fuck, like he’d forgive Tony anything if he just…. Tony found that after six months, he wasn’t in a good position to say no again. 

“Come here,” he said gruffly, and pulled Peter into a hard hug. 

Peter made a rough sound and fought him, hands pushing clumsily at Tony’s ribs with a fraction of his usual strength. “Don’t—how can you even touch me? After everything I did?” he said, voice cracked and raw.

Maybe he should have, but Tony didn’t let go, and after a few tense moments, Peter’s shoves changed. He fisted his hands in Tony’s shirt inside his jacket, tugged and clutched at it until eventually he’d grabbed Tony’s sides. Tony pulled him in closer and Peter’s grip only tightened and flexed. Peter started to shake. He was tall enough now that he could easily hook his chin over Tony’s shoulder—which he did, hard enough that the point dug into his trapezius. The arc reactor pressed painfully into his breastbone and probably into Peter’s, but neither of them moved.

When Tony put one hand in Peter’s hair, the kid made a chaotic sound, full of so much pain and relief, Tony had to shut his eyes. Peter tipped his temple against Tony’s, and they stood there for several long moments, long enough that he thought, even through the block, he could feel their link renewed. Healed. 

Peter was crying, breath hitching wetly against Tony’s neck, his arms and hands clutching at Tony’s shoulders in a way disturbingly reminiscent of Titan. “God, I missed you so much, Mr. Stark. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry for everything.” Tony shuddered and held on tighter. 

“It’s okay, kid. Everything’s gonna be okay.” By reflex, he backed them up to the bed and sat down. A thrill shot up his spine when Peter climbed right into his lap and held on, before pushing him back.

“Just—just for a minute. I swear I won’t do anything, I just—”

“It’s fine,” Tony said, already half-drunk on how good it felt to have Peter so close. They lay there, sprawled diagonally across the bed, and the feel of Peter breathing against him, the press of his chest and stomach when he inhaled, was the single best thing he could remember. Then Peter wriggled one hand under Tony’s jacket and shirts to find skin, and _that_ was the single best thing he could remember.

In what felt like under a minute, Peter had passed out hard, probably drooling onto Tony’s jacket. Tony drifted with him because, who was he kidding, it’d been about six months since he’d had any decent sleep, either. 

He came around to find that the light had changed, the angle of shadows shifting in the tiny dorm. He swept the room, gaze sticking only briefly on the markers of two teenage boys living together. The roommate’s side at least had a few pretentious movie and music posters—jazz and film noir. He was doubtless insufferable. It appeared that Peter had brought almost nothing from home besides bedding, clothes, and his laptop. His side was entirely stripped of his personality. Or was it their fucked-up link that had stripped it out of him?

Guilt gnawed at Tony, and he tried to shake it off—hard enough that he woke Peter from his nap with a start. Rolling onto his side, Peter propped himself up on one elbow and rubbed his eyes. “Shit, how long was I out?” he asked, then yawned hugely. 

Getting a good look at his tonsils, Tony said, “Beats me. Couple hours. Why, you got somewhere to be?”

Peter shook his head. “No extracurriculars for me this semester.”

“Too sick, I’m guessing.”

Peter gave him a long look, then shrugged. “I’m making it work.”

Tony’s eyebrows lifted. “Oh, is that what we’re calling this?”

“That's what I'm calling it.” Peter rolled up to a seat, though he left his knee pressed to the side of Tony’s leg. 

Tony snatched the pillow-armrest thing that every college student, ever, owned and propped himself up with it. He regarded Peter and tried to square the haggard, stretched-thin kid seated across from him with the Peter he’d known less than a year ago. Though the nap had done him good, they were different people.

This was, however, absolutely the Peter of Tony’s recent dreams. 

“So, how’s that sleeping-your-way-through campus thing working out?," he asked, because fuck beating around this particular bush. "Are you keeping a tally somewhere? No bedposts, so no notches, I guess.”

Peter offered a meticulously casual shrug. “It’s great. I love it. How's it going for you?”

“I'm not sleeping my way through campus.”

“Through Manhattan's most fabulously wealthy and idiotic, then.” 

Tony couldn't decide whether to wince or smile, it felt so good just to be here, even sniping at each other about this. “I'll be honest with you, Pete, it's not amazing.”

Peter's mouth twitched, like he was struggling, too. “It’s what you wanted, though, right? Me to have a life of my own. You to…not have me tagging along everywhere.”

“Yeah, kid, that’s what I wanted.” It felt a fist to the chest, saying that out loud. From back when punching him in the chest might have killed him. 

“Then…” Peter gestured like, what more was Tony after?

“A little alarming to be there in the room with you. Scary from my end to think you’re out here by yourself, not using Strange’s block like you’re supposed to.”

Peter’s expression broke, and he finally looked away, color creeping up his throat. “I didn’t know you'd be able to tell. I just needed to feel something after…” He shuddered. “Those first months were so awful without you, I could hardly think. So I let the block slip enough that I could feel you again. Just a little.” He shot Tony a shifty look. “I didn't know how it worked with the, um. With the sleeping around. I should be sorry.”

The _but..._ hung in the air until it became obvious Peter wasn't going to say it. The kid seemed the most sorry for all the things he wasn't sorry for. “So, can you…right now?” Tony asked.

“Can I, what?” 

“Can you tell what I’m feeling?” Tony hadn’t practiced the meditation to keep up his mental discipline and keep the kid out, so he didn’t try.

Peter’s expression went blank. 

“What?” Tony asked. “Something on my face?” He tried for a smirk.

“I don’t want to go digging. I know how you feel about me,” Peter answered.

“Do you.”

Peter huffed out a breath. “I know you couldn't bring yourself to—to— You’d rather have cut off your arm than—” 

Jesus, he still couldn’t say it, so Tony said it for him, because somebody had to. 

“I wouldn’t fuck the seventeen-year-old kid who had such a crush, he brought me back from the dead? Is that what we’re talking about here? Is that what I was supposed to do?” He said it as casually as he could manage and was satisfied to see Peter flinch. 

“Please don’t call it that,” Peter said quietly. 

Tony shook his head. “Look, I know what you felt, Pete. I felt what you felt. And I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t one of the best feelings I’ve ever known. To _know_ just how much you—” Tony cut himself off, because apparently there were things he couldn't say, either. Peter’s head snapped up at that, so Tony tried to change tack. “You gotta know why I wouldn't go through with it. I’m not—I couldn’t saddle you with my bullshit. I couldn’t do it.”

Peter blinked at him wide-eyed, and Tony thought he probably hadn't tacked hard enough there. “But I did this to you, Mr. Stark. I pushed all this on you. You’re the one saddled with me. With my bullshit.”

“Oh yeah, and what’s yours? Too fearless for your own good? Bounces back from anything? Too kind and selfless?”

“Bringing you back was the most selfish thing I ever did,” he said. “If anyone else had been there in that moment, they would have let you go. Let you rest. But I couldn’t. I still can't.” He shook his head, sniffed, and rubbed his nose. “And I’m not bouncing back too well right now. I'm not handling any of this too well, so I’m…I'm not who you thought I was.”

Tony frowned, but couldn’t regret his decision, either. He’d made the right call, and so had Peter, getting the heck outta Dodge. That he hadn't quite been able to shut Tony out didn't take away from his accomplishment. “No, I know who I’m talking to. And I’m almost fifty years old, kid. With more paranoia, PTSD, and lousy coping skills than you ever deserve to deal with. I’m not first, last, or always material, and I can’t be where you end up before you even start.”

Peter hesitated, eyebrows lifting. “Did you practice that?” he asked.

“Maybe,” Tony said without missing a beat. “I’ve had a while to work on it.”

“So have I. And you definitely wouldn’t be my first.”

“Well, at least there’s that to be thankful for.”

Peter smiled, and even if it was a little tarnished, it was still fucking fearless. 

“I don’t know how you do it.” Tony said quietly, after silence had fallen. It hadn't even been loaded or heavy silence. “Run straight at everything like it’s gonna turn out okay.”

Peter looked hard at him. “You think I’m not scared? That I don’t get scared?”

“No, Pete, I think you’re young. And I think you have a lotta faith. You get to be my age, everything scares you.” 

Peter regarded him with all that faith risen up from where he’d hidden it, and Tony let him look his fill. No one would ever have said he didn't like to be the center of attention. 

“What scares you more?” Peter finally asked. “How much I still…how much I still love you, or that you might love me back?”

Tony forced himself to hold the kid’s gaze. “There was never any question on the second one, kid. No matter what you might think.”

“But you don’t like I do.” He didn’t speak it like a question, though it still felt like one.

Tony shook his head, frustrated. “It doesn’t matter how. The only thing that matters is living your life the best you can. And coming out here was a great start. Though I might have gone south instead of west.”

“In-state tuition,” Peter said, distractedly, clearly winding himself up to argue.

“I’ll pay wherever you wanna go,” Tony said, derailing him. “Wherever you wanna go.”

Peter paused just as he was about to speak, his mouth dropping open. 

“Just say the word.”

“I…” He blinked. “I want to go to school in the city and be with you. That’s what I want.”

“I can’t do that right now, Pete.” Tony looked him in the eye and begged him to understand. “You know I can’t.”

“Then I don’t want to go anywhere else,” Peter said, voice pinching. Sharpening. “I came out here to get away from the city—everywhere you were. And I came out here because I hoped it would hurt you.”

Tony huffed a surprised laugh. He clapped Peter on the knee and left his hand there. “It did. Good work.”

Peter put his hand over Tony’s, threaded their fingers together, and gave him a razor smile, his eyes wet. “Thanks.”

*

Peter let Tony take him out for a non-dining-hall dinner at a steakhouse in the burbs, let Tony order the most expensive stuff on the menu, and ate everything put in front of him. He rubbed his stomach when Tony slid his credit card across the table for the waitress. 

He accepted the card silently when Tony slid it to him after he’d paid. “Just in case you need to get back to the city quicker than a seven-hour bus ride.” Watching Peter slot the card into his wallet, Tony wondered if this was a cease-fire or the beginning of actual peace talks.

On the drive back to campus, Peter filled him in on the politics of community college faculty, after the second snap. “Apparently, a bunch of adjuncts got hired full-time, and now the tenured guys are back, and it’s a mess,” Peter said. 

“Juicy,” Tony said with a smile.

“But lots of stuff is a mess. At least May and I were both gone. Lots of parents are five years older but their kids are the same age.” He shot Tony a quick look. “Can you imagine if I was twenty-three instead of eighteen, how different that would be?”

Tony had imagined. He walked Peter back to his dorm but turned down his invite to come up. 

“Bobby won’t be back until tomorrow afternoon. You could stay, Mr. Stark.” He was so earnest as he said it, so close to his old self, Tony didn’t know how to act. 

He put his hand on Peter’s shoulder, then slid it to the back of his neck. “Thanks, kid, but I made a firm promise to myself when I hit forty never to sleep in another dorm room, and I’ve stuck to it.” He’d stopped fucking college girls was what he’d done, but Peter didn’t need to know that.

“So, you’re leaving,” Peter said.

“Yeah, I’ve gotta get back. Didn’t tell anybody I was coming here.” Christ, the thought of ever telling anyone about Peter gave him hives. Greedy, possessive hives.

Peter shoved his hands in the pockets of his coat and shivered, his silence gone heavy.

Tony squeezed the back of his neck. “Do me a favor, all right?” He lowered his voice. “Take better care of yourself. Keep up the block so you can get some sleep and maybe think straight.” In the early dark of January, Tony didn’t need to see Peter’s face to know that he was healthier with Tony here, touching him. 

Peter covered Tony’s hand and slid it from his neck to his face. He pressed his nose briefly to the center of his palm, then cupped Tony’s hand against his cheek. “I’m keeping up the block as much as I need to, Mr. Stark. Before you texted me that you were here, I felt you on campus. I knew you were here. I can’t give that up. And the most important thing is, you can’t make me.”

Tony smiled crookedly at his words thrown back at him. “All right, how about, call me if you need anything.”

Peter nodded. “Deal.” Then he said, “Likewise.”

*

The dreams stopped after that. And whether it was because the kid wasn’t sleeping around as much, or he'd figured out how to keep Tony out of it was anybody’s guess. Tony knew which he preferred. He did miss the dreams, though, just a little.

He quit sleeping around, too, because fair was fair. 

When February dragged into March, and Tony’d had no need to be Iron Man and blow anyone up, he visited Strange again and toasted the universe’s apparent post-snap burnout. “Seems like even the supervillains are taking a break to get themselves sorted out,” he mused into his tumbler. 

Strange kicked his feet up on his kitchen table (not one of his relics, then) and raised his glass. “Don’t say that too loudly.”

“It’s been quiet on your end, too, huh? No dark dimensions looking for a snack?”

“They’re always looking for a snack,” Strange answered. “Perhaps other worlds are more vulnerable at the moment. I’d be more concerned about that little time machine you built, and who’s going to come through it next.”

Tony dropped his head back in his chair and groaned. “You really know how to bring a guy down, Steve. Can I call you Steve?”

“I’d rather you didn’t.”

“And that machine is on lockdown, don’t worry.”

“Maybe it is here and now, but can you guarantee that it always will be?”

Tony pointed at him. “Don’t do that. If someone uses it in another time, that’s a problem for future-Tony.”

Strange rolled his eyes. “Not if they come to this time. The consequences of you playing with time will out.”

“The consequences of me playing with time are what brought you back, my friend.”

“Very true. All I’m saying is, be ready.”

“I promise I’ll invite you to the party if, like, the Red Army show up wearing time travel wristbands.”

“Please do.”

*

When Tony found himself in Peter's room again, Peter was alone and fully clothed, perched on the side of his bed with his heels drawn up on the frame. Knowing what Peter suffered to be able to do this, Tony was struck yet again by how very _different_ they were, despite appearances. 

The block on Tony’s end could do nothing to the link itself—only bypass the effects of it, most importantly the negative effects of a 300-mile separation. Yet Peter reached out to him from across the state, accessing the link despite the pain it must cause him. Tony built a suit of armor around himself, but inside he was just a scared, breakable human. No serum, no spider bite, and without Nat’s cannonball courage. Standing here with Peter, even in sleep, he was acutely aware of this.

He crossed the room, Peter’s eyes lifting to his as he approached, the dream filled with static silence. Taking a seat beside him, he rested a hand on the bedspread but couldn’t feel it. He found Peter watching him, his eyes an inky black in the dark of his room. 

_I know you don't want me to do this_ , he said. His lips moved but the words echoed in Tony’s head. _I’m sorry_.

Tony looked around the room, at the roommate’s empty bed. He tipped his shoulder toward Peter’s and imagined the faint buzz of proximity as Peter leaned closer too. _This is better than whatever I’d be dreaming about_. He pictured it, just in case Peter could somehow see that too—the breathtaking, bone-shattering violence of the final battle. The crunch of Thanos’s fists, his blade destroying Tony’s suit. Mud and rock and torn trees. The gauntlet burning a path up his arm that spread inside him, boiling his blood, turning it to syrup, suffocating him.

Peter leaned abruptly away from him, and when Tony looked up, he had his phone in hand. Tony heard it ring loud and clear, the sound piercing the silence of the dream. Only, it was his own ring. That was his phone. 

_Come on, Tony, pick up. Wake up._

Tony blinked awake, his phone vibrating and ringing on his bedside table. Hand flopping around like a fish, he managed to grab it before it fell off or went to voicemail. “’Lo?” 

“Hi,” Peter said softly. And Tony’s heart clenched painfully at the intimacy of it.

“Hey, kid,” he answered.

“Is that what you normally dream about?”

“When I wasn't getting my voyeur on with you, yeah, pretty much.”

“I knew you had nightmares. From back when we—you know.” Back when they had to sleep together to be able to function the next day. It felt like ages ago. “That was intense.”

“Most nightmares are,” Tony grumbled, rubbing a hand over his face. “Are yours different?”

“I don’t really dream about that stuff, I guess.”

Tony smiled, despite everything. “Fearless.”

“Bounces back easily,” Peter added, a smile in his voice too.

“What do you dream about, then?”

“My uncle Ben. You.” He exhaled a quiet laugh. “The people I can’t have.”

“Ah.” A light went on. “That’s what you’re afraid of—losing the people you love.”

“Well.” Peter blew out noisy a breath. “They keep dying. I don’t know what it is. Maybe I’m cursed.”

“No such thing,” Tony answered with as much confidence as he could assemble. Better not bring Strange in on the subject, though.

“Then what—”

“You’re in a tough line of work, kid, and so were your parents. So were mine. None of it gets easier,” he said. “Ever.”

Oh, and look. There was last season’s set of nightmares waiting for him—his mom and dad bleeding out as Tony tried to reach them, Captain American and the Winter Soldier beating the shit out of him, all set to murder him, just like they had his parents. Thirty-year-old trauma as fresh as if it’d just happened. The hits kept coming. 

Layers and layers of shit. Concentric circles of heart-stopping fear and betrayal after betrayal until the only remaining explanation was Tony. Obie, Nat, Fury, Cap—they had all lied to his face like he wasn’t worth the oxygen it’d take to tell him the truth. Tony wasn’t worth the truth.

“…Mr. Stark. Tony— _Tony_.”

He sucked in a sharp breath, unsure how long Peter had been calling his name. “Yeah, sorry. What were you saying?” He rubbed his eyes, pinched the bridge of his nose, and tried to silently talk down his heart rate.

“I said, maybe it gets easier if you have someone in your corner. Someone who’ll always be in your corner.”

“Sure, but they’re not too easy to come by.” He could feel Peter about to volunteer and viscerally did not want promises from him. Pepper had taken care of him for so long, gotten him through the worst of himself. It hadn’t been fair to her then, and it’d be even less so now for Peter to take on that albatross.

Like he could read Tony’s mind over the phone—Tony wouldn’t put it past him—Peter asked, “What about, um. What about Ms. Potts?” Tony barked a laugh. “You don’t have to talk about her, sorry,” Peter rushed to backpedal. “Forget I said that.”

“No, no. Why not? Pepper, uh. She knew a lost cause when she saw one, but she, like so many of us, thought she could organize it better. Which she did, sort of, until it became obvious that a company was safer and more rewarding to wrangle than me. It was a good call.”

“Do you miss her?” Peter asked quietly.

“Sometimes.” He would have married her in a heartbeat, with just as much thought beforehand. He would have ruined her life. But he dreamed occasionally, on the good nights, who their kids would have been. “Not so much anymore. It’s been longer for me than for you. Eight years. Jesus.” She’d hated the violence, the nightmares, the waiting to hear if Tony’d gotten himself killed. Unlike Tony, she had been able to quit it.

He sucked in a harsh breath, pulling himself out of the sucking pit of his own self-pity and doubt. 

“Well, that was fun. Let’s talk about you for a minute.” He shoved himself upright against the headboard and dragged his fingers through his hair. “How’s school?”

Peter gave a jittery laugh. “It’s school. I, um, still don’t know if I’m supposed to be here, when I know I could be helping out in New York. It feels selfish, what I’m doing. It all feels selfish.”

“Enjoy it while you can, is what I say. And you were, I thought.” Though it'd been months since Tony had fallen into one of those dreams.

He could almost feel Peter cringing. 

“I should…probably apologize for that,” Peter said. When Tony waited for it, however, Peter still didn't. 

“Doesn’t sound like you’re too sorry.”

“Doesn’t seem like you hated it.”

Tony smiled to himself and hoped Peter could feel it. “Why’d you pull me in tonight, Pete?” 

The soft rustle of fabric on the other end could have been a shrug. “It’s cold here. Lonely.”

 _Maybe you should come home_ , he wanted to say. He wanted to say it so badly, it was on the tip of his tongue. But he squeezed his eyes shut and swallowed the words. He was hanging on by a thread, but he was hanging on. Spider-Man did it all the time. 

“Find somebody on your floor who’s awake,” he offered instead. “I guarantee there’s somebody on your floor who’s awake.”

“Nah. I wanted to tell you about this idea I had for a suit modification. If you’re not too tired. We can talk later.”

Tony shook his head and pulled his knees up to tent the blankets. The one popped and the other groaned. “Now’s great. What have you got?”

*

It wasn’t the Red Army, in the end, but Tony hadn’t been far off. Cold comfort.

“So, uh, Russians from the future—with robots, added bonus—are attacking New York and DC. You said call if I needed anything, Pete, so I’m calling. It’s all hands on deck, and we’re short a few hands. Call me back. Get here. Suit up. You know the drill.” He was about to hang up, but hesitated. “Be safe, kid. Come find me.” _I need you here_ , he just managed to not say.

He’d been Iron Man in the past year, of course, but mostly he wore the suit for transport because he didn’t feel like waiting at airports. Fighting for his life and defending New York had to be like riding a bicycle, right?

The first hit threw him into the side of a building and knocked the air from his lungs. He stayed on hands and knees longer than he should have, tried not to have a panic attack, and listened to the office workers around him make an orderly exit with only a little yelling and cursing. The battle of New York had been eleven years ago—Tony was glad the city remembered. 

When he pushed to his feet, having determined that he could still get knocked around and come through it, Peter’s phone number flashed in the HUD, and with a great exhale of relief, he connected. 

Peter cut him off before he could get a word in. “Mr. Stark, are you okay? I’m sorry I couldn’t answer before. What’s going on—where are you?”

“I’m hangin’ in there, kid. It’s good to hear your voice.” He got back in the air, feeling the absence of his team like missing limbs. They were all gone. All of them. Bruce would get here soon, but Tony, Strange, and Wanda were the first responders, and that was not enough. Especially when Strange made it clear he was defending the Sanctum and only the Sanctum. 

“Likewise,” Peter said with feeling. “Look, I don’t know how quickly I can get there. All flights are grounded into New York—I had to rent a car.”

“Do you even know how to drive?” Tony’s stomach did an unhappy roll. “Wait, you’re not old enough to drink, let alone rent a car.”

“I can swing down alleys at night without smacking into anything. I think I can handle a Honda Fit on the highway at four-thirty in the afternoon. AndIhaveafakeID,” he finished in a rush.

Tony laughed, in spite of everything. “I’m sure it’s super convincing. Okay, kid, eyes on the road, hands at 10 and 2, and you’d better be on Bluetooth right now. And don’t tailgate. Use your turn signals. Check your blind spots.”

“Got it, got it, got it. I don’t think you do any of those things, though, when you drive.”

“Remember your gray area, smartass. I’d tell you not to speed, but let’s ignore that one right now. Don’t speed so much that you get pulled over. How far out are you?”

“Syracuse? I don’t know how far that is. I got a little bit of a head start. I could feel something was coming and left in the middle of class, but what if it’s not enough time? What if I can’t get there fast enough?”

Tony was wondering that same thing, but he didn’t want to freak the kid out on the New York State Thruway. Rhodey was tied up in DC. So were Wilson and Barnes, as far as he knew. Russia was at least a well-known hostile power, so he’d have plenty of air and ground support soon, but that was a delicate operation in the city, with so many civilians. And how did an act of war from the future even work, diplomatically speaking?

“Maybe you’ll get lucky, and I’ll have it all wrapped up in a bow by the time you swing onto the scene,” he said, desperately hopeful. Maybe Fury already had something in motion. If he did, though, Tony flattered himself to think he’d be in on it.

“Save something cool for me to do, all right?”

“Maybe you can web a few bad guys before—” Drone fire cut him off, and he ended the call to Peter before he distracted himself and got shot out of the sky.

Tony tried to draw the drone up after him, to engage above the city where it’d be a better target for that air support, but every hostile he’d engaged had stayed stubbornly at street level. He chased this one around a corner just as FRIDAY shouted a proximity warning at him and he came upon a swarm of them, guns trained on a seething mass of terrified civilians—the after-work rush. They’d been rounded up like cattle. 

Tony froze, and before he could act on this change of tactics, a voice broadcast simultaneously from every drone. 

“Come quietly, Tony Stark, and these civilians will be released. We are eager to negotiate your peaceful surrender.”

He could probably wipe them all out at once, but the falling debris would be a deathtrap for everyone below. He’d make one hell of a bargaining chip for their side, and Fury would definitely not be happy about this, but Tony could at least buy everyone some time to organize themselves against a threat they could never have seen coming. He could buy Peter more time—though what he could do against all this with web shooters and a plucky attitude, Tony could only imagine.

As far as Tony knew—and he knew a lot—his path through the quantum realm was the only time travel gig going. Yet somehow, the Russians had his tech. Pym’s too. He’d watched the footage of their arrival—seen the suits. They’d wanted to be seen. 

He couldn’t seem to make something without it coming back to bite ten-fold. It seemed only fair that he pay the penance for exposing the world to this new threat. 

Raising his hands in surrender, he dropped to the pavement. The suit was coded to only work for him, but he still locked the arc reactor, grateful that at least now, it wasn’t hooked into his heart. 

It still hurt when the guys from the only manned aircraft ripped it off him. It hurt when they knocked him over the head, too. Which was when it occurred to him, as he pitched toward the ground, black closing around him, that perhaps this was not an all-out assault on New York and DC but a kidnapping.

*

He came around to one hell of a headache and numb hands, his arms bound tightly behind him where he lay curled on his side. Oh, and a bag over his head. When he tried to stretch out, his head and feet came up against car upholstery. He was in the trunk of a car. When he sniffed, he smelled fuel, heard the tick of the engine. They’d stopped recently, which was probably what had woken him, but without knowing how long he’d been out, he had no way of knowing how far they’d gotten. The heaviness in his limbs and the grit in his eyes told him they’d drugged him to keep him quiet, and when he made a soft sound of inquiry for FRIDAY, she made no acknowledgment.

He was on his own. 

With a _pop_ , the light changed above him, fresh air flooded in, and two guys grabbed him. They hauled him out of the trunk, but his feet didn’t want to stay under him, so they mostly carried him across what felt like a wet, gravel lot. He smelled river water and shivered, fear-sweat drying tight and acrid on his skin.

This was obviously not the first time he’d been kidnapped, and like most things in his life, it didn’t get easier with time or repetition. He was dumped on wet, crumbling blacktop, right on his elbow, and he lay there for several moments as a few sets of footsteps milled around him, trying not to pass out from the agony of what was probably a fracture. He thought with vigor and, for perhaps the first time, believed, _I’m too fucking old for this_. 

At the very least, he needed to get serious about calcium supplements. Also, maybe brush up on his Russian. There were voices all around, speaking urgently and softly. They were in a hurry, and they’d better be. No way they’d gotten here without one hell of a chase. He doubted they could have made it off the island of Manhattan, if the NYPD and SHIELD were worth anything at all.

Feet shuffled nearby and the ties on his wrists were cut. His hands flopped uselessly to the ground, totally numb, and maybe he’d worry about that in a minute, but they were slipping something over his wrist into his palm and putting him in some kind of tight-fitting suit. He tried to rub his head along the floor, tried to drag the sack off so he could see what the hell was going on, but someone was in charge of the bag, because they kept it tugged firmly down at his collar.

He was lifted to his feet again and held between two guys, his little posse of kidnappers clustered in a tight circle, saying something about a rendezvous. He recognized that word. 

Device in his hand, a tight-fitting bodysuit, and a rendezvous…. Tony swam through the sedative’s haze to the conclusion that he was about to be zapped back to the future using one of his own devices, or one very much like it.

Blind panic ripped through him as he made a desperate sound and flailed out of his captor’s grip, crashing to the floor. He kicked and rolled away from the hands that grasped for him, and finally yanked that fucking hood off himself. He got his knees under him and squinted against harsh flashlights, the weird light of dusk, and the blurred shapes of three men standing over him, two of them with guns pointed at his head. 

Which was when Tony confronted the truth that he wasn’t getting rescued. A strike team of this size could avoid surveillance and police, and the only plan they needed to get him off the island was the programmed device in his hand. 

Which he slammed against the pavement and shattered, lighting up his busted arm with pain so intense it stole his breath. 

They hit him again—face and gut—doubled him over, and with a few bitten-out words, one of the guys slid his own wristband off. Tony lay still, dazed, as they switched his device, heart thudding with dread. Leaving his timeline could kill Peter, even with the block.

But that pain in his arm wasn’t just his elbow. It heated the inside of his forearm, nerves firing and burning, and traveled up into his armpit, circled his heart. 

“Fuck,” he gasped as it flared impossibly hot, and a voice whispered inside his own bloodstream, rushing in his ears, _staydownstaydownstaydownstaydown_. 

Silence hung in the air a moment before gunfire exploded in his ears. 

Tony flinched and pulled his arm close to his chest, shielding the device as his captors fell on top of him. Warm wet spattered across his face and into his eyes, and he blinked hard to clear them.

A slight pressure at his back—upper and lower simultaneously—barely caught his attention, until he was _yanked_ out from underneath the bodies on top of him and back away from the fight. The elastic twang of Peter’s webs barely made a sound amid the gunfire, but Tony recognized it and rolled right into Peter’s waiting grip.

“Holy shit, stay down—stay down, Mr. Stark,” Peter said, tugging him behind a parked car, shielding him with his body. It wasn’t the Iron Spider suit—bullets would go right through this one.

“Get this thing off me,” Tony managed, arm still tucked tight to his body, his voice still a little slow. “Careful, it’s set to go somewhere I really don’t want to.”

“Okay, hold still.” Peter’s fingers traced over and around the device, looking for the catch. 

“I broke the last one,” Tony said. “If you wanna take this one apart, though…”

“I got it, I got it.” Peter released the clasp, and the device fell into his hand. Then he dropped it on the ground and grabbed Tony into a hard hug. He was shaking all over, and so was Tony, Peter’s heartbeat thudding so fast it was almost a thrum against his ribs. But when Tony reached for the collar of his mask and tugged it up, Peter kissed him like it would reset the world on its axis.

And it did. Tony felt the energy of the universe realign itself in his body, suspension bridges and tunnels sliding into place where they belonged. With a sharp moan, Peter angled into it, both hands on Tony’s face like he could press them into one person.

“I thought I was gonna lose you,” he said against Tony’s mouth. “I was so sure.”

“How’d you find me?” Tony fisted his hand at Peter’s back and kept him close.

“I had Strange get rid of the block completely. Tony, they’d lost the—lost the car you were in. There were decoys, and you switched vehicles, and we lost you, but I knew where you were. I closed my eyes, and it was like I could see—”

That explained the shaking. “You were way out of range, Pete,” Tony said. Especially after how long they’d been apart. 

“I know—I’m fine now.” He exhaled a jittery laugh and pressed his brow to Tony’s. “Better by the second.” His gloved fingers trailed down Tony’s face, and even though it was dark, they found his bruises. “You’re hurt.”

He was, but the shooting had stopped, and Peter was touching him, so he’d already forgotten the pain. “I’m good, kid. Help me up.”

They hauled each other up off the pavement, and for the first time, Tony got a look at their surroundings. They were way uptown on the east side by the looks of it, down by the water in a mostly-vacant and muddy lot. In the year since Bruce had snapped everybody back, life had mostly resumed its normal pace, but there were still quiet, lonely-feeling places like this, even in New York. 

He also got a good look at his rescuers. 

“This has been such a crazy day, Mr. Stark.” Peter’s voice was a little rough, but his arm had steadied around Tony’s waist. “That’s Cap and Peggy and the Winter Soldier from the 1970s,” he said, pointing, “and they knew my phone number because I gave it to them in the future. Can you believe that? They picked me up in a quinjet after you hung up, so I left the car on the side of the road. Enterprise isn’t going to like that. I used your credit card, so you might need to follow up with them.”

That was indeed Cap, Peggy, and the Winter Soldier. Tony recognized them even has his brain tried very hard to tell him it wasn’t possible that they were here in 2023. In the ambient glow of the nighttime city, he could see Steve’s wrinkles and Peggy’s gray hair. Barnes looked the same.

With his injured arm clutched across his front and his other over Peter’s shoulder, Tony didn’t offer to shake hands and neither did Steve. 

He nodded a greeting and said grimly, “This was HYDRA, not Russia.” And Peggy-fucking-Carter dug the toe of her boot against a dead guy’s thigh with great distaste. “It’s my fault,” Steve said. “I had to get Bucky out—I couldn’t let him just…but we couldn’t get to him, even when we knew where he was going to be. I got desperate.” He shook his head. “Sloppy. HYDRA got hold of your device and some Pym particles and used them to get to 2043, but they needed you for something bigger they have planned. So, they sent the strike team to take you and disguised it as a drone strike on DC and New York.”

Tony drew away from Peter to stand on his own two feet. “Why would HYDRA think I’d ever help them? I know they infiltrated SHIELD. They should’ve kidnapped me from a time before I knew that.”

“Well, you hadn’t invented time travel then,” Peter said helpfully.

“True.” Tony turned, and the look Peter gave him—brilliant and besotted, if Tony was any judge—should have embarrassed the hell out of him. But today, he was too tired and sore and happily not-dead to be embarrassed.

“They have Peter,” Peggy said. 

“What?” Tony jerked his gaze back. 

“In 2043, they have Peter. That’s how they planned to make you help them. You’d…well, you’d gone by then, and they needed you.”

Peter’s presence at his side kept the ground steady under him, but he really wanted to sit down. The implication of not only middle-aged Cap and Peggy but fucking _HYDRA_ knowing that the way to Tony twenty years in the future was still through Peter made him want to sit down and breathe into a paper bag.

“Do I need to go back with you? To 2043? Is that—we can go now—”

“I’m coming too,” Peter put in. 

“Kid—” Tony rounded on him.

“I can take incompletes in my classes! I’m not letting you go alone, Mr. Stark.”

“Don’t worry, that’s what I meant by _we_. Take it down a notch.”

“I think we can take it from here, actually,” middle-aged Cap said with a crooked smile, and thank god he lived in another decade now, or Tony would never hear the end of this. “Peter Parker in 2043 has a good head on his shoulders, and we’ve got a plan.”

“You’d better,” he said. Then added with a smirk, “Some retirement, huh.” Steve smiled and shrugged, and the wrinkles suited him. He’d been a grandpa from the day Tony had met him, anyway. Peter pressed against Tony’s side again, and his heart gave a hard lurch. “Make sure you get the kid back. Don’t make me come after you.”

Cap threw Tony a quick salute, and then they were gone, leaving Tony and Peter in a muddy lot with no transport except the piece of shit car Tony had arrived in. At least he wouldn’t need to go back in the trunk. He heard sirens and thought, he might not have to ride in that thing at all.

Glancing at the bodies on the ground, he asked, “You think Fury knows anything about what happened today?”

Peter nodded and bent down to rifle through the pockets of the dead guys. “Yeah, old-Cap filled him in on the situation. I’ve gotta call him and let him know you’re okay and the 70s team is back to the future. Time travel is so cool—I hope I get to do it someday.”

“It’s a literal and figurative trip,” Tony agreed. “Kid, what’re you looking for?” He rubbed his head and winced at the goose egg he found. God, he needed a nap. Getting knocked out and drugged was not a restful way to be unconscious.

“This,” Peter said, pressing to his feet and proudly handing over the arc reactor. “I better grab that time travel bracelet too, right?” He darted back around their cover car in search of it.

“Better get that mask back on, too,” Tony called. Those sirens were definitely headed this way.

Peter came back into the lamplight fully suited up, device in hand. “You should see a doctor,” he said. “You could have a concussion.”

“I almost certainly do. But I can take care of it at the apartment.” He swayed on his feet and Peter slotted himself back in at his side.

“I can help,” he offered. 

“I was hoping you would. Let’s go home, huh?”

*

They took apart the bracelet the next day in the lab he’d set up for himself. Peter had let his professors know he’d needed to come to New York because of the attack and he’d be back the following week. The details of why were not offered.

He’d spent the night in Tony’s bed glued to Tony’s back, snoring gently into his hair.

Tony hadn’t even minded.

They stood over the dismantled bracelet in silence, now. 

“Well, I hope Cap and Peggy’s plan worked,” Peter finally said, “and Nazis from the future don’t keep showing up to kidnap you. Or, like, go back in time and win World War II.”

“You and me both,” Tony answered. His brain hurt at the twists and turns of how HYDRA in the 70s could get to HYDRA in 2043. But if all time was essentially happening at the same time, all the time, then past-HYDRA and future-HYDRA were just a Stark-bracelet away from each other. 

“Tony.”

He frowned and looked up, liking the sound of his name in Peter’s mouth. “Yeah, kid.” He still liked the sound of that, too, though.

“This wasn’t your fault.”

“Sure, I know.”

“Okay, because it feels like you’re blaming yourself.”

He nodded. “I am. Seems like everything I do turns into an arms race. Used to make me big bucks, and now it’s…an escalating disaster.”

“You saved half the universe,” Peter said with stubborn loyalty. “And someone’s using what you accomplished for bad stuff. That’s the cost. That’s the price.”

“No, that’s how you rationalize it.”

“Well, what else are we supposed to do—stop trying?” Something sharp and bitter leached into Peter’s voice and into the link like poison. Tony picked up on the change from _you_ to _we_ , too. “I can’t not try, Mr. Stark, and neither can you. It’s one of the best things about you, but you treat it like it’s some kind of curse. You’re Tony Stark—everyone wants to be like you, including the bad guys.”

“A ringing endorsement,” Tony said dryly. “I thought you were trying to make me feel better. Which, I should reiterate, it is not your job to do.”

“You know what I meant,” Peter bit out. “And I know you wish I’d let you go that day, and you’re gonna hold that over my head for the rest of our lives, but I’m not sorry I did it. I tried to be sorry, but I’m not. I tried to not love you, but I couldn’t do that, either. So, if you don’t want me to try to make you happy, then…then—” He shook his head. “I can’t _not_ try. You have to send me away, for good. Is that what you want?”

Tony brushed the scarred pads of his fingers against his thumb, the leathery texture of his skin a good distraction from his pounding heart. Leave it to Peter to want healthy communication about feelings. “Bad things happen to the people who get close to me, Pete,” he said quietly. “I happen.”

Peter shook his head. “Bullshit.”

“No. Not bullshit.” Tony dropped down onto a lab stool and looked up at him. He rubbed his hurt arm in its sling. “It’s…hard for me to—to trust people and feel safe in my own head. My own skin. I thought I had it with Pepper, but I laid all that fear and paranoia on her when I was trying to protect her from it. So, she got out. She had to. I’ll be damned if I do that to you.”

All that fear of what would fall out of the sky next—aliens, Thanos, mass extinction—Tony had survived all of it, but here he sat in front of an eighteen-year-old kid, still scared. 

Luckily, Peter had a direct line to his heart, so he didn’t have to say that last bit out loud. Though that was all the more reason why he should.

“You don’t want to send me away,” Peter said. A statement of fact. Tony shook his head. “You’re scared, but you don’t want me to leave again.”

“I wanna give you the whole world, Pete. But more than that, I wanna do right by you. I just hope I can figure out how to do that.”

Peter took a cautious step closer, his thigh brushing Tony’s knee. He put a hand on the lab table, and Tony spread his knees wider. Peter fit himself between them.

“I have some ideas,” he said. He was on his way to smiling.

“Yeah?”

Peter nodded. 

“Let’s hear ‘em.” Feeling bold, Tony slid his hand from his knee to the back of Peter’s leg.

“Let me do what I do best,” Peter said. “I’ll swing in and I’ll save you. I’ll carry the weight when you’re tired. I’ll do what you did for me.” He put his hand at the back of Tony’s neck. “Tell me sometimes that I didn’t screw up—tell me I did good. That’s doing right by me. That’s what would make me happy.” His fingers slid up into Tony’s hair and when he tugged gently, Tony tipped his head back. 

He moved his hand to Peter’s waist. “Sounds fantastic, kid. I’m in if you are.”

In answer, Peter leaned down and kissed him. 

*

Peter had exiled himself to western New York because he thought he’d forced himself on Tony, and that even if Tony loved him, Tony didn’t want him, and could never. The truth was, of course, much more complicated than that. Tony thought that, maybe, they’d managed to translate and simplify things, at least a little.

So when Peter pressed him down onto the bed and climbed up over him, kissed a path down his throat, and carefully unbuttoned his shirt, Tony let him do it. Let him nuzzle and nip at the softness around his stomach. Let him grind restlessly against his thigh. More than that, Tony let himself, enjoy it.

Tony stopped him at the fly of his jeans. 

“You gotta go slow with me, kid,” he said. “I need to go slow.”

Peter nodded eagerly. “Yeah, okay.” He crawled back up the length of Tony’s body and settled against his side. “What do you like?”

Tony huffed a laugh. “All kinds of stuff. But let’s stick with the basics for now.”

Peter looked at him like this was a trick question. “Which are?”

He unbuckled the sling and slid it off to the side. “Get on me and kiss me.”

“Is your arm okay?”

“It’s fine—only a tiny bit broken. I’m on the good drugs.”

Peter grinned. He skated his hand up Tony’s middle to his chest, dipped it over to fit snugly between his underarm and his ribs, and rolled on top of him.

Never let it be said that making out and dry humping weren’t _hot as fuck_. Peter was goddamn perfect as ever—more so now that he played a little dirty, the pressure of his thigh against Tony’s balls almost more than he could take. He nipped at Tony’s throat and scrubbed the stubble on his chin along his jaw, and Tony almost wept.

Tony stripped him out of his shirt, touched and tasted every inch of skin he could reach, and came his fucking brains out like hadn’t in years. Something about friction and the rhythm of bodies. Something about Peter grinding and sweating above him. Something about the heartline looping Peter’s pleasure into his and Tony’s into Peter until he couldn’t tell them apart, sent him through the fucking roof. He was invincible, and he was dying, and he wasn’t alone, so he didn’t care which was true.

*

Peter lay half on top of him, after, tracing figure-eights between his nipples and around his scars. He blew cool currents of air across his skin and rubbed the arch of his foot against Tony’s ankle. Tony drifted forward to days and nights of them—how close they could get, and what it would feel like. Peter would develop a system, categories, a taxonomy of their link. Tony’s heart thumped at the thought of it. Of all the time they had.

Only they didn’t. Peter had a semester to finish, three hundred miles from here. He had years of school ahead of him. Months, if not years, with their link blocked so they could survive apart.

As though catching the trail of his panic, Peter stirred and pressed up to regard Tony with sober dark eyes.

“We’re gonna need a plan,” Tony said. 

“I have one of those,” Peter answered.

“I figured. Lay it on me.”

“Once I’m done with my classes this semester, I’m not going back there. I’ll go to school here in New York. I want to go to Columbia.”

Tony blew out a pent-up breath. “Then we’ll need rules, too, especially if you’re still living at home.”

Peter nodded. “Yeah, May won’t like it if I stay over, but if I live on campus, she won’t have to know where I sleep.”

Tony cocked an eyebrow. “You’ve given this some thought.”

“I think about lots of things,” he said with a slanted smile. Then it faded. “Like…where Cap and Peggy and Barnes went, into the future, you were already gone.” He put his hand over Tony’s old surgery and shrapnel scars. “That gives you and me twenty years at the outside. That’s not much time.”

Yeah, Tony hadn’t missed that little nugget during their daring rescue. “Hey, you might wanna be rid of me by the time you’re forty.”

Peter shook his head and ducked his gaze, so Tony covered the kid’s hand over his heart.

“But assuming you still want me around…that was _a_ future. It doesn’t have to be ours. All kinds of things can happen between now and then. Plus, uh. If you’ll recall, I’m bound to you by an Infinity stone. I’m not even sure you _can_ get rid of me when I die.”

Looking at their joined hands, Peter nodded. “I’ve been thinking about that, too.”

“So, really, you could be getting way more than you bargained for.”

“No.” Peter shook his head and shot him an intense look. “I think that’d be exactly what I bargained for. I think we’ve been kind of conditioned to see the Infinity stones as bad or like…forces of chaos. For good reason,” he added quickly, when Tony raised his hand to object. “But.” Tony watched Peter’s mind work, a divot forming between his brows as he thought it through. “It was the Soul Stone that took in half of all life when Thanos used the gauntlet. It didn’t want to give us back. It’ll take us again.” Peter met his gaze. “But it wasn’t cruel.”

“What are you tryin’ to tell me, kid?”

“When I made the deal last year, I knew the stone felt familiar. I’ve been where we’re going. I know where we’re going.” He looked at Tony with eyes that had seen death and were no longer afraid. That made two of them, he supposed. 

“Buddy system in the afterlife, too, huh?” The enormity of it all pressed in on them, but Tony didn’t quite feel it here in the bubble of his bedroom.

“I hope so.” Then Peter leaned down, spine bowing as he nuzzled into Tony’s armpit. 

“What—hey—” Tony clutched his arm close to his body, unbearably ticklish there, and let out an undignified giggle as Peter used a little of that super-strength to pry him back open. Careful of his banged-up elbow, he bared the deep red line of scar tissue running up the inside. Still naked to the waist, his own mirrored Tony’s, disappearing into the soft nest of hair under his arm. To his surprise, Tony wanted to get his face in there, too, no matter that Peter definitely smelled like a ripe teenager after what they’d just done.

Peter held him there for a long, heavy moment, searching his face or maybe seeing his future. Whichever it was, when Tony reached along their link, he found what he’d been missing. 

It was what he’d been missing for a long, long time.

“Wanna shower up?” he asked, voice thick. 

“Yeah.” Peter ducked down and kissed him, then climbed off the bed. They bumped shoulders on the way into the bathroom.

End.

_are you afraid_  
_because I’m terrified_  
_but you remind me_  
_it’s such a wonderful thing to love_  
_it’s such a wonderful thing to love_

**Author's Note:**

> Bumped for exchange reveals! Apologies if you've seen this more than once. And allow me to introduce myself! I'm June! Come say hi on [tumblr](https://itstartledme.tumblr.com/), if you like!


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